![]() ![]() The movie could just as well have been four hours long: Here’s one more overblown set piece! One more hollow twist for your excitement! The director, Tom Harper (who made the very good “Wild Rose”), keeps the action pumping - the hand-to-hand fights and machine-gun battles, a cardboard 007 prelude in which Rachel manipulates her way through a casino, then parachutes down the side of a seemingly endless mountain. This isn’t storytelling, it’s wheel-spinning. ![]() Yet it doesn’t have a plot so much as an endless digressive chain of events that are churned out like sausage links. With Gadot’s Rachel as a superspy out to save the world, the movie is a degraded descendant of the Bond thrillers. There are many reasons why movies are now too long, but “Heart of Stone,” which clocks in at a laborious two hours, demonstrates an especially wearying form of bloat. It feels like a virtual threat orchestrated by a virtual screenwriter. It revolves around trying to get his hands on the Heart, an all-powerful device of artificial intelligence that sounds a lot like the Entity, the Internet-gone-amok villain of “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.” The Heart, which has been in the hands of the Charter, is “Heart of Stone’s” second MacMuffin: a concept that’s theoretically fun to think about (and that looks, when we see it, like the world’s most complicated espresso maker), yet we never actually witness it doing anything. So is Parker ( Jamie Dornan), a charmer who flirts with Rachel - but that’s mostly an act, since he’s got his own agenda. Rachel isn’t the only member of her MI6 team who’s fooling everyone. They’re just a utilitarian thriller abstraction. We never have any idea of what they’re up to, how they operate, or where they fit into the global nexus. We see her interact with other members of the Charter, yet the outfit is really the film’s first MacMuffin. She’s actually a member of the Charter, an international group of agents who have bonded together - with allegiance to no country - to make the world a safer place. Rachel is a counteragent, a spy among spies. Except that as we learn, that’s all a ruse. ![]()
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