HEART OF STONE

Here's the honest call. It's already on Netflix, and that's the right place for it. Gal Gadot brings her signature charm as spy Rachel Stone, the landscapes are beautiful, and a handful of action sequences do their job. But the story underneath is thin — assembled, our reviewer felt, from spare parts of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and JAMES BOND, without a lead character deep enough to make you care.

What redeems it is its heart. This is a movie that genuinely honors courage, sacrifice, teamwork, duty, and good conquering evil. Those are worth something, and they're what lift a two-star thriller above forgettable.

The costs are modest but real: roughly fourteen obscenities, a few light profanities, and a steady diet of intense action violence — gunfights, chases, and an explosive climax. That's why this earns caution for older children.

So: if you want an undemanding evening of spy action with a decent moral spine, cue it up at home — where you can pause, judge, and decide for the younger ones yourself.

Rachel Stone is an operative of the Charter, a secret peacekeeping force — and she's working deep undercover, posing as a green new recruit inside MI6.

Her cover team botches a mission at a luxury ski resort in the Italian Alps and loses their target. Back in London, a shock lands: one of Stone's MI6 colleagues is a double agent, working with a mysterious hacker named Keya. Their goal is the Charter's crown jewel — an advanced AI program called the Heart. What that machine can do, and who's willing to burn the world to control it, is where the chase begins.

Two stars, and here's what they buy you. HEART OF STONE has all the spy-thriller furniture — explosions, chases, action sequences hopscotching across international locations — and it deploys the scenery well. Some of those set-pieces are genuinely exciting, and they distract, our reviewer admits, from a narrative that badly needs distracting from.

The trouble is the foundation. The plot feels insubstantial, stitched together from fragments of better franchises, and as the launch of a hoped-for new series it starts underwhelmingly. Great spy thrillers live and die on their lead, and while Gadot is charming, Rachel Stone lacks the depth to carry the weight. The other characters fade into the background of their own scenes. Pleasant enough, never gripping.

For all its narrative shortcomings, HEART OF STONE believes in the right things. This is a strong moral worldview with real redemptive touches. The film exalts courage, sacrifice, teamwork, and duty — and it never doubts that good should conquer evil. Those aren't small virtues to build an action movie on, and they align cleanly with much of what Scripture calls us to.

One moment captures it: offered an escape route during an ambush in Lisbon, the heroine chooses to stay and save her team. That instinct — to lay down safety for others — is the film at its best, and it's the reason a thin thriller still leaves you with something worth keeping.

The concerns are the ordinary furniture of the genre rather than anything the film celebrates: obscenities in the dialogue, spies who steal, gamble, lie, and speak of poisoning targets. The movie treats none of these as virtues; they're the texture of a dangerous world, set against a hero who does the right thing.

At its center is a familiar longing — that good would finally win, that someone would step in and save. Rachel Stone stays behind for her team; the gospel tells of One who laid His life down for us all. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

HEART OF STONE won't rewire the spy genre, but it means well and looks nice, and it honors courage, sacrifice, and duty along the way. With mild language and steady action violence around older children, this one's an easy wait for home — where you can pause, weigh it, and decide for the younger ones yourself. Looking for something for the whole family instead? Try our latest family-friendly picks.