'Heart of Stone' review: Gal Gadot stars in solid action thriller

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The Netflix action picture "Heart of Stone" stars Gal Gadot as the secret agent Rachel Stone, ostensibly a member of MI6 but really an undercover operative for an international crime-fighting conglomerate called The Charter.

The Charter is one of those world-order maintaining associations we've seen quite often in movies like this — it's the cheaper cousin of the Impossible Mission Force. It achieves its objectives through oversight of a surveillance tool called the Heart, which seems to be capable of seeing and controlling everything, everywhere, all at once.

Introduce such a tantalizing program and you know what comes next: a power-hungry bad guy who wants it for himself. Enter Parker (Jamie Dornan), teaming up with Keya (Alia Bhatt), to wrest away control.

Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo co-stars and the movie includes  several scenes from a genuine acting legend, whose surprise appearance won't be spoiled here. The director is Tom Harper ("Peaky Blinders"), from a screenplay by Greg Rucka ("The Old Guard") and Allison Schroeder ("Hidden Figures").

MY SAY This movie sounds like an elevator pitch dreamed up by the Netflix algorithm. It's a "Mission: Impossible" rip-off with an A-list action star, a topical MacGuffin for the age of AI, midair stunts, car chases, globe-trotting from Senegal to London to Iceland and beyond, and everything else one might anticipate.

The boxes get checked, the i's get dotted, the t's are crossed and something strange happens on the way toward oblivion: The movie offers a genuine good time.

That's largely because Harper and his team know that nothing needs to be taken seriously. This is not a movie about the dangers of artificial intelligence's proliferation or the risks of a surveillance apparatus spun out of control.

The absence of a misguided reach toward significance, an attempt to make "Heart of Stone" about anything more than its surface, allows for the focus to be where it belongs.

That's on the big action scenes, Gadot's single-minded determination and credible fighting skills, and the scenery-chewing villainy provided by the consistently underrated Dornan, a far better actor than he was allowed to be in the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movies.

The less time spent dwelling on the plot, the better, especially when one considers that this all-powerful, all-seeing device seems to exist on the equivalent of a thumb drive.

The simplicity should not be mistaken for a lack of filmmaking flair; Harper knows how to build suspense and construct a sequence with layers. He's not exactly working on the same canvas, with the same tools, as the "Mission: Impossible" series director Christopher McQuarrie, for example, but it's a close enough approximation.

When the "Heart of Stone" star sky-dives into a sprawling blimp-like structure and then fights it out with the bad guys while balancing precariously, before plunging to the ground while dodging debris, it's enough of a spectacle that the narrative rationale hardly matters.

BOTTOM LINE This is a perfectly solid action movie, even if it offers nothing we haven't seen a million times before.