Heart of Stone (2023)

Netflix spent a reported 150 million dollars on Heart of Stone, which buys a great deal of Alpine snow, a Lisbon car chase of genuine mechanical fury, and Gal Gadot as Rachel Stone, a technician for MI6 who is secretly an operative for a shadowy peacekeeping body called the Charter. She is a woman occupying a role historically reserved for men in tuxedos, and she wins every physical exchange the screenplay arranges for her. The film never says so. It casts her, lets her put a man through a window, and moves on to the next set piece. That reticence is itself instructive.

The supporting cast is notably multiracial (Alia Bhatt in her American debut, Sophie Okonedo, Jing Lusi), and the production earned the ReFrame stamp for gender-balanced hiring. The plot wanders past Indian criminal syndicates and a Senegalese village without stopping to comment on either. Race and gender exist here as casting facts, not as arguments. On nearly every other marker of contemporary social consciousness, the ledger is blank. No queer characters. No climate anxiety. No critique of wealth, since the villainous Charter is a cabal of bureaucrats and not a corporation. No body-positivity messaging. Rachel's expulsion from several schools for violence is framed as delinquency, not as neurodivergence. No history is revised, because the film has no interest in history.

The residue is a competent, expensive, faintly exhausting exercise, the second most-watched Netflix film of late 2023 and a fixture on year-end worst-of lists. Critics found it about nothing at all, and on this narrow question they were correct. A woman headlines a franchise-starter and the film declines to make a case for it. The cultural content amounts to a hiring decision. That is either quiet progress or indifference wearing the same coat, and the movie, to its credit or its cost, will not tell us which.