I don’t know how much Netflix paid Gal Gadot to star in its action movies “Red Notice” and “Heart of Stone,” but if the reports of $20 million for the former and at least that for the latter are accurate, I have two comments:
1. Kudos to Gadot for becoming a genuine Hollywood star and getting paid what a male actor would for the same work.
2. Imagine how many Israeli productions Netflix could have helped fund for the same amount of money.
I have nothing against Gadot as an actress. She’s good at playing a certain type of character – the what-you-see-is-what-you-get action hero who brings a likability to all of her performances, whether that be the invincible Diana Prince in the “Wonder Woman” franchise, invincible master criminal The Bishop in “Red Notice,” or invincible super-spy Rachel Stone in “Heart of Stone.” (Note to Netflix: No film in the history of movies has ever been very good when its title riffs off the lead character’s name.)
Margot Robbie put it best when she explained recently why, as a producer, she had wanted to cast the Israeli actress as Barbie before Greta Gerwig wisely insisted that there was only room for one GG on her movie set: “Gal Gadot is so impossibly beautiful, but you don’t hate her for being that beautiful because she’s so genuinely sincere, and she’s so enthusiastically kind that it’s almost dorky.”
Gadot remains that clichéd girl next door who just happens to be a supermodel – a skillset she shares with Robbie, of course. Something else she shares with Robbie is very much being in charge of her own career: she’s still working on a TV series about Hedy Lamarr and still developing her own take on Cleopatra. I’m far more interested in the show about the Hollywood star than the Queen of the Nile – and not just because of the latter’s chances of starting a new regional war between Egypt and Israel.
Despite that undeniably relatable screen presence, Gadot’s Netflix movies are depressingly soulless affairs: slick, expensive and devoid of heart (actually, “Devoid of Heart” would have been a far more accurate title for her latest extravaganza).
It doesn’t matter how many talented people are involved, there’s just something about the streamer’s big-budget film endeavors – from “Red Notice” and “Heart of Stone” to “The Gray Man” and “6 Underground” – that fails to engage on any level, fundamentally an emotional one.
For sure, there are plenty of talented people working on “Heart of Stone” – and I don’t just mean the two women (Christiaan Bettridge and Eniko Fulop) doing Gadot’s stunts. The script is co-written by Allison Schroeder, who previously worked on the “Hidden Figures,” the acclaimed drama about Black women at NASA in the early Space Race, while the director is British filmmaker Tom “The Aeronauts” Harper.
I’ve been an interested observer in Harper’s career since 2006, when I interviewed him upon his winning the BBC New Filmmakers Award for a short film called “Cubs.” I wonder what his younger self would have thought had I told him that 17 years later, he’d be making a big-budget movie wholly reliant on stunts and special effects (oh, and for the small screen).
Most of his early works were small, character-based dramas – but good luck getting one of those made today if you also want to pay the rent. It’s easy to understand, then, why Harper would say yes to a high-profile film like “Heart of Stone.”
I learned the hard way a long time ago not to judge the artistic choices made by directors, actors, etc. when I asked a well-known English actor why he had appeared in a particularly bad Hollywood movie. His response was a mini-rant about how he hadn’t worked in a couple of years, had kids and a mortgage to pay, and why did some journalists think actors operated on a different level from the rest of humanity? In short, choosing work based solely on the “artistic” imperative is a luxury reserved for the very few.
Harper delivers everything you’d expect for a film in the genre, and I assume there is a market for such fodder. Otherwise, why would Netflix’s algorithms keep serving them up on such a regular basis? Someone is liking this stuff, right? Because I’m beginning to suspect it’s just some elaborate system to accumulate/use air miles (the exotic locations in “Stone” include Iceland, Portugal, and Italy).
I can only guess the intended audience is families who have one eye on the film and the other on their phone screen – that thoroughly depressing phenomenon that even has a name: second screen media. Just to note, this is nothing new: people have been talking about second screen usage for over a decade. It’s just that this is the first time films and shows are allegedly being made with the second screen user in mind (i.e., it doesn’t matter if a bit is dull or doesn’t work; the viewer will just look at their second screen and return to the first for the next big moment).
With the number of times I shrug my shoulders at this kind of Netflix movie, I’m in danger of being mistaken for a Frenchman. Would it have worked better had I seen it on the big screen? Unlikely; a friend had that dubious pleasure thanks to a small theatrical release in London, and his response was, “It was even worse than ‘Red Notice.’”
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far (I’m still haunted by Ryan Reynolds’ self-satisfied performance in that film, which created a whole new term: “smugshot”), as there was a point of interest about “Stone.” It’s the third work in recent months to offer us a rogue spy network working for the “greater good” of humanity, following Prime Video’s blah series “Citadel” and the latest “Mission: Impossible” installment (and where the latter gives us an AI threat that can wipe out the planet called The Entity, “Heart of Stone” offers us a quantum computer called The Heart).
It's a win-win for someone
This sudden interest in spies acting as superheroes perhaps comes as a response to comic-book hero burnout at the movies, offering up the message: we want heroes to save us from all the villains out there – but please, no capes. If the studios really think a bunch of spies working off the books for another secret organization are our best chance of saving the planet, things are even worse than we thought.
Bizarrely enough, the action hero Gadot reminded me of this weekend was Jason Statham – the British “actor” who answers the question: What would a chuck steak look like if it tried to pass itself off as human?
That’s because I also had the misfortune to watch Statham in “The Meg 2: The Trench,” which brought an end to my winning streak at the movie theater – which began with “M:I7,” “Barbie,” and (with reservations) “Oppenheimer,” carried on with a couple of great French thrillers (most notably “The Night of the 12th”), and continued with the fun documentary “My Name is Alfred Hitchcock” and the even-more-fun Australian thriller/horror pic “Talk to Me” (butchered in Israel with a title that plays on the phrase “You touch it, you buy it”: “You Touch it, It Kills You” – way to go, Israeli distributor, for putting a spoiler in the actual title).
Statham and Gadot are old-school Hollywood stars in that they play one role, and they do it as well as their skills allow (in the mega-shark sequel, Statham doesn’t even bother with the pretense of an American accent that drifted in and out – but mainly out – of “The Meg”). It’s also a comfort zone that their fans enjoy seeing them in, so it’s win-win for both parties. For the rest of us, maybe not so much.
“Heart of Stone” is out now on Netflix.
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