When she does show up an hour into the movie, Alia's confidence is hard to miss, notes Sukanya Verma.
'It's too dangerous.'
Now where have I heard that line, like, only a zillion times before?
Tom Harper's Heart of Stone is the sort of generic action movie whose bland, by-the-numbers masala doesn't have an iota of originality in it.
Why would I care for a dumbed down Bond, Bourne or Hunt when there are already so many of them in the market?
Even a 60-something Tom Cruise has to jump off planes and buildings to grab our eyeballs and it's still not enough in the face of franchise exhaustion. What chance does Heart of Stone's worn-out conflict and spiritless action have in such a cut-throat scenario?
So this one has a woman kicking all the butt.
It's always nice when they do -- Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie, Michelle Yeoh, Priyanka Chopra, all so accomplished in their badass avatar. But charisma alone is not enough in the absence of crackling writing.
Gal Gadot's dynamic action heroine prowess in Wonder Woman makes her a text-book fit for spy roles.
She has the vigour and intelligence.
She can be both gracious and blunt.
But her distant, deadpan Rachel Stone in Heart of Stone, which Gadot has also co-produced, is such a boring, uninteresting character, it's like staring into a void.
Turning this utterly charming movie star into a yawn is not Heart of Stone's only follies.
Alia Bhatt in baggy clothes playing a 22-year-old tech-whiz, oscillating between two ideologies like a confused kid caught in a divorce asked to pick between mumma and dadda.
Maybe if Alia's Hollywood debut had happened right after Highway, her Keya Dhawan, a resentful orphan from Pune, weaponised to break into sophisticated security systems, wouldn't feel as strange.
Despite the odds, Alia holds her own.
She doesn't speak in a phony accent, which is a relief considering half her role is a phone call.
When she does show up an hour later into the movie, Alia's confidence is hard to miss. A better crafted movie would know what to do with it, but Heart of Stone has no imagination.
An all-important high-tech software called HEART is the 'most formidable weapon you never knew existed, with its ability to hack you-name-it, play oracle and pull up data out of everything from mobile phones to the military.
Funny after all the time devoted in tom-tomming HEART's might as this invincible, impenetrable machine (that looks like it was made from Minority Report's tossed away touch screens), all it takes a 20-something is five seconds of drumming the keyboard and she’s hacked into it faster than finishing a UPI payment.
Call them Spectre, IMF, S.H.I.E.L.D, Hydra or Citadel, all these super-secret, super-sophisticated international intelligence agencies are doing the same old save-the-world shtick since time immemorial. The one in Heart of Stone goes by the name of Charter and is built by ex-intelligence hotshots maintaining the world order when governments slip.
And so between lacklustre chases that'll make video game races look dramatic and a backstabbing hero-turned-villain cut from the same cloth as Pathaan's gone rogue Jim, Stone must destroy the bad guys, rescue the good guys and put HEART back in its right place.
Sadly, Heart of Stone can't make any such claims.
Heart of Stone streams on Netflix.
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