‘Heart of Stone’ Review: Gal Gadot Shifts From Superhero to Superspy

Her multiple manifestations as Wonder Woman have made Israeli actress Gal Gadot the queen of the DC Universe, but no mere franchise, apparently, can contain her. Her anticipated appearance as the Evil Queen in the already controversial, live-action “Snow White” marks her Sherman’s March into prime Disney territory, while “Heart of Stone,” with its abundant techno-wizardry, breathless violence and a pre-credits action sequence that lasts 20 minutes, shows her primed to be a new James Bond. Never mind the trajectory of the bullets. The trajectory of her career is far more interesting.

Whatever dramatic appeal “Heart of Stone” might have had for Ms. Gadot, who is one of the more watchable people in often barely watchable movies (“Red Notice,” “Wonder Woman 1984,” several “Fast & Furious” films) is a mystery. So is her identity in this Tom Harper -directed action-thriller, which jumps off the rails as quickly as Ms. Gadot’s Rachel Stone jumps out of the MI6 van. Rachel is supposed to be a tech agent who stays behind, surveilling and typing, while the field agents actually chase down the arms dealer in the casino in the Italian Alps where guests arrive by helicopter. The team is connected to a network of satellite-enabled computers back at HQ, but Rachel has to get into the action because of a bad wireless connection. A viewer is sympathetic and at the same time bewildered.

Rachel is not what she seems, which becomes clear once she starts thumping evil-doers up and down the ski slopes, executes derring-do by parasail, motorcycle and zip-line along a ski-lift cable. She is invincible, save for those rare occasions when the screenplay by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder requires her to be vincible.

In other words, conventional spy-movie stuff with some impressive action sequences, stomach-flipping chase scenes and one outlandish tweak to the format: Rachel is part of The Charter, an organization of superspies whose leadership is identified by their rank in a standard deck of cards. The King of Diamonds ( Glenn Close ), for instance, or the King of Clubs (B.D. Wong); the Jack of Hearts ( Matthias Schweighöfer ) is their home-base IT guy, conjuring hologrammatic schematics out of thin air, and Nomad ( Sophie Okonedo ) is their team leader. Only they know Rachel’s secret identity. Yang (Jing Lusi), Bailey ( Paul Ready ) and Parker ( Jamie Dornan )—the crack MI6 colleagues whose bacon she secretly saves on more than one occasion—think she’s the team nerd.

The “heart” of “Heart of Stone” is one of those things Hitchcock would have called a MacGuffin, a plot device posing as an enhanced computer that can hack any program anywhere and promises world domination to whoever possesses it. The villain with the vendetta is computer genius Keya Dhawan (a terrific Alia Bhatt ), who isn’t as evil as she seems, though others are more evil than you imagine. Ms. Gadot is magnetic, will probably make a delicious Evil Queen in “Snow White,” and is spinning her wheels in the snow of the Alps, the dust of the African desert and the lava sands of Iceland in an effort to place the cornerstone, so to speak, in the construction of yet another kinetic movie series.

—Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.