‘Heart of Stone’ Review: Gal Gadot Plays a Rogue Agent in a Joyless Thriller That’s All Rote Logistics

We all know what a MacGuffin is: an object or event that the plot of a thriller hinges on, and which everyone onscreen keeps talking about, yet it has no intrinsic interest apart from how it serves the structure of the movie.

The term was mythologized by Hitchcock, and as shorthand for the way a certain kind of movie works it has never gone out of style.

But what do you call a MacGuffin that’s so boring the audience can’t pretend to care about it? Let’s call it a MacMuffin.“Heart of Stone,” a double-crossing espionage thriller that is joyless, convoluted, and sludgy-looking — in short, abysmal — is a movie chockful of MacMuffins.

Gal Gadot, working hard to come off as blithe and cool (something one should never work hard to do), plays Rachel Stone, an intelligence operative who is part of a chummy veteran spy team that…

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