In Review: 'Heart of Stone,' 'The Last Voyage of Demeter'

This weekend finds Netflix offering up the latest in a line of faux blockbusters while theaters don't fare much better with a 'Dracula' sidequel.

Gal Gadot is Rachel Stone in ‘Heart of Stone’

Heart of Stone
Dir. Tom Harper
123 min.

Between Red Notice, The Grey Man, The Adam Project, the two Extraction movies and, now, the proposed franchise-starter Heart of Stone, the sample size of blockbuster-sized Netflix action-adventures is large enough to see a pattern. It’s not just that these movies stink, but that they have redefined the straight-to-video model for the streaming era. They have big stars and big budgets, but there’s no motivation to make a film that people would open up their wallets to see in a theater. It just has to clear the much lower bar of being clickable and watchable, and feel like it has something approximating the value of an actual blockbuster. While these films are much more expensive than the straight-to-video knockoffs of old, they have the same generic, off-brand, that’ll-do aesthetic and it doesn’t seem like Netflix needs anything better. (Or is even capable of producing anything better, for that matter.) 

And so here we have Heart of Stone, which is basically Hydrox Cookies Presents Mission: Impossible. There’s Gal Gadot in the Tom Cruise role of a versatile and indefatigable agent for a super-secret, super-elite organization that stops various world-ending plots from coming to fruition. There’s a lot of globe-trotting location work, from the Alpine mountains to the thin cobblestone streets of Lisbon to the golden desert of Senegal. There are not as many real stunts, but certainly plenty of outsized action set pieces, aided by mind-blowing advances in computer and satellite technology. It’s such a studious facsimile, in fact, that you begin to appreciate the small choices and grace notes that separate the Mission: Impossible series, arguably the best action franchise we have, from soulless hackwork. Not that it seems to matter to Netflix, of course.

 

In what sounds like a Troy McClure character, Gadot stars as Rachel Stone, an intelligence agent who eventually has to keep a techno-MacGuffin called “The Heart” from getting into the wrong hands. (Heart of Stone. So many meanings to that title!) The splashy opening sequence casts Rachel as the designated truck-bound computer nerd among a four-person MI5 unit attempting to nab a notorious arms dealer who hasn’t surfaced in three years. But when the operation goes sideways, she reveals herself to be much more capable as a field agent than even Parker (Jamie Dornan), the best and hunkiest of her peers. It turns out that Rachel is a member of “The Charter,” a secret peacekeeping agency that uses The Heart—an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-purpose satellite gizmo—to mete justice to the most dangerous terrorists on earth. When one such diabolical keyboard jockey, Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), sets her sights on the device, it’s up to Rachel to save the day. 

Heart of Stone is coming out at a time when the use of AI is part of the negotiating impasses between Hollywood and the writing and acting guilds currently on strike, and there’s no escaping the impression that it’s a movie that feels written by a computer about computers. The official synopsis is pure off-the-rack plotting, for one: “An intelligence operative for a shadowy global peacekeeping agency races to stop a hacker from stealing its most valuable and dangerous weapon.” And The Charter itself is a green-screened-to-hell interface that resembles a super-sized version of the grab-and-swipe orchestration Cruise conducted in Minority Report. But then, the film also attempts to be a sop to humankind, rejecting the algorithmic and probabilistic efficiency of machines in favor of the can-do grit of agents like Stone, who have instincts that computers can’t replace. 

Yeah, right. Nice try, AI. 

While Gadot continues to be a star of limited charisma, Heart of Stone makes good on the assignment. It is exactly the sort of sleek, expensive-looking, time-wasting mediocrity it sets out to be. Millions of Netflix subscribers will half-watch it while doom-scrolling on their phones this weekend and before it gets buried by other new content (or old episodes of Suits), perhaps the numbers will be good enough to justify a sequel. And that sequel will make good on the assignment, too. When the guilds finally get their new contract, the hope is not only a future where computers will not be allowed to replace writers, but one where writers will distinguish themselves from computers. — Scott Tobias

Heart of Stone premieres on Netflix tomorrow.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Dir. André Øvredal
119 min.

Whoever decided that 2023 should be the year of Dracula-adjacent stories should probably have given it a little more thought. April brought Renfield, a drag of a comedy that never produced more than a handful of variations on its central joke. Now comes The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a deep dive into the single chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula recounting the bloodsucking count’s sea voyage from Transylvania to England. But if there’s a story there that needed expanding, The Last Voyage of the Demeter never finds it over the course of its 119 minutes.

That the plot’s outcome is never in question doesn’t help, but the journey to that inevitability could have been far more compelling than the one featured here. That’s in spite of a solid cast, the presence of André Øvredal (director of Trollhunter and a pretty good adaptation of the middle school fright classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark), a pounding Bear McCreary score, and some moody camerawork by Clint Eastwood regular Tom Stern. Even without a famous vampire, it would have a lot of tools a spooky movie needs to do spooky movie stuff. But those elements just lend a patina of competence to a movie that struggles to find a reason to exist.

An undisclosed element of the boxes of Transylvanian dirt the Demeter is transporting to England, Dracula awakens to menace a crew that includes Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a philosophical doctor trying to make his way back to England after running into racism in Romania; Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham), a loving grandpa who’s brought his grandchild Toby (Woody Norman) aboard for his last voyage before retiring (a sure sign that one or both are doomed); and Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), a competent first mate set to take Captain Elliot’s place. Also aboard: Anna (Aisling Franciosi), a Transylvanian brought along by Dracula who decides she’d rather fight back than become a snack.

So what went wrong? Much of the blame can be laid at the feet (talons?) of Dracula himself. Before long, our heroes become aware of a bloodsucking menace in their midst but any fright seems misplaced. The Demeter’s Dracula is a tired, intangible-seeming bit of FX trickery that looks seems like it’s aiming for a fresh, edgier version of Nosferatu’s Count Orlok but instead looks like a wrinkled-up Gollum and behaves like a Jurassic Park raptor. He might scare the passengers and crew of the Demeter but offers nothing horror movie fans haven’t seen before as he picks victims off one-by-one, like a 19th century forebear of an Alien xenomorph. That’s a better movie than this one, as are countless previous adaptations of Dracula. Have you seen the 1979 version by John Badham? It’s got a sexy Frank Langella and a hallucinatory love scene designed by Maurice Binder, the man responsible for a bunch of classic James Bond credits sequences. Check it out sometime. Maybe instead of seeing this. —Keith Phipps

The Last Voyage of the Demeter docks in theaters tonight.