Netflix can always be relied upon to deliver uninspiring and formulaic action blockbusters, so on that note Heart of Stone can’t be faulted for doing what almost everyone thought it was going to do by taking a pasting from critics, with the streaming service’s latest blockbuster holding a typically downbeat Rotten Tomatoes score of just 32 percent.
However, it’s over on IMDb where things get a lot more interesting and just a little bit disheartening, with Tom Harper’s globetrotting epic currently the fifth lowest-rated title bearing that exact moniker. With a current rating of just 5.2, Gal Gadot’s ass-kicking operative is lagging well behind the 8.1 of the 2009 documentary about an inner city school, as well as a German TV movie from 1995 about an orphan who befriends an elderly woman.
A 1950 adaptation of the fairy tale Das kalte Herz is ranked higher, too, thanks to its 7.3 ranking on IMDb, and we can’t forget the 2016 fantasy drama with a 6.1, either. In fact, 2023’s vintage is only barely ahead of Heart of Stone #6, a 2001 erotic thriller following a woman who has an affair with a married man that soon devolves into a string of murders.
You get the suspicion that Netflix may not want to market its latest expensive investment as “officially the fifth-best Heart of Stone in cinematic history,” but based on nothing but the numbers, it’s an indisputable fact, even if it’s difficult to imagine any of the others making a resurgence based on a vested interest in nothing but the nomenclature.