<img src="https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/18/0/0/1600/1067/664/0/75/0/548d893_1692346055673-agent-stone.jpg" srcset=" https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/18/0/0/1600/1067/556/0/75/0/548d893_1692346055673-agent-stone.jpg 556w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/18/0/0/1600/1067/600/0/75/0/548d893_1692346055673-agent-stone.jpg 600w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/18/0/0/1600/1067/664/0/75/0/548d893_1692346055673-agent-stone.jpg 664w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/18/0/0/1600/1067/700/0/75/0/548d893_1692346055673-agent-stone.jpg 700w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/18/0/0/1600/1067/800/0/75/0/548d893_1692346055673-agent-stone.jpg 800w" sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 556px, 100vw" alt="Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot) in " heart="" of="" stone,"="" by="" tom="" harper."="" width="100%" height="auto">
How can anything involve so much money and still be so cheap? Faced with the deafening detonations in Heart of Stone (Agent Stone in France) and the disgusting wedding cake of Red, White & Royal Blue (My Dear F***ing Prince in France), two feature films at the top of the charts on their respective platforms, Netflix and Prime Video, the question becomes nagging.
As different as they are, both films share a disregard for the intelligence of their audience that the means made available to these productions attempt to disguise. Whether it is the action film that sees Gal "Wonder Woman" Gadot attempt to match Tom Cruise's performance or the gay transatlantic romantic comedy, the scripts seem to be have been spat out by a machine to which the first word in the phrase "artificial intelligence" would do much honor.
Of course, Heart of Stone is a huge production built around the star status that Wonder Woman conferred on Gadot, while the young men who play the lovers of Red, White & Royal Blue (Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine) are almost unknowns, which is fitting for a film with a more modest budget yet still able to move its lovers between Washington, Austin (Texas), London and Paris.
If they are brought together here, it is because they seem symptomatic of one of the most worrying damages that the streaming economy is inflicting on cinema: the race to the bottom in terms of audience expectations and tastes.
Produced by David Ellison's Skydance, like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Heart of Stone shares other similarities with the latest exploits of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), making for a comparative test between an old Hollywood production and content destined for streaming. On either side, the MacGuffin is an artificial intelligence capable of monitoring and modifying all the activities of humankind; once again, the world's salvation depends on a group of secret agents operating outside the law and institutions.
In the Netflix version, spies from all over the world band together to form a transnational organization that tries to limit the blunders of their respective governments, thanks to "The Heart," a little name given to the aforementioned artificial intelligence (in Mission: Impossible, AI is a weapon of mass destruction).
In the name of freedom, one celebrates the permanent surveillance of all by a small group (each agent is codenamed after a playing card, so there can be no more than 52 of them). But who cares, as long as the screen is in perpetual motion? All the cliches of contemporary thrillers are present and correct: the car chase in an inconvenient location (Lisbon), the representation of digital virtuosity (a nerd drags images through space), and the choreographed combat.
You have 51.51% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.