‘Degraded descendant of Bond thrillers’: Gal Gadot, Alia Bhatt’s spy film Heart of Stone slammed by critics

‘Heart of Stone’, Netflix’s new thriller starring Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt and Gal Gadot has brought out every critic’s stone heart. The spy thriller about an international secret agent who must use all means to protect the mysterious MacGuffin known as ‘Heart of Stone’ has been slammed by critics for its generic plot and poor performances with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 4.9/10.

Variety called the film “joyless, convoluted, and sludgy-looking” as well as a “degraded descendant of Bond thrillers”. Their review described the film as a laborious two hours long weary form of bloat without a plot and an endless chain of events filled with action sequences.

Mashable wrote that the film has glaring similarities with Tom Cruise’s ‘Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One”, calling it a “flimsy action knock-off” and also said that the assemble of the star-studded cast, including ’50 Shades Of Grey’s” Jamie Dornan, failed to charm owing to a bad script that gave them little content to start with.

Giving it a meagre 2/5 stars, Indian Express wrote that Alia Bhatt’s talent had been wasted, as this was the Bollywood actor’s debut Hollywood project- pointing out how she was minimised when her talent could have been utilized better. Their review futher criticised the film’s poor dialogue and overuse of character’s talking in cliche’s like  “You know what you signed up for”, and, “Behind you!” or the limited ways their roles were fleshed out throughout the film.