We’re a day away from the premiere of Heart of Stone, the new Netflix movie that puts “femme spies” (named for the 1990 La Femme Nikita) back in the lead. Starring Gal Gadot, Jing Lusi, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, Glenn Close, and a few notable men; written by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, and directed by Tom Harper, Heart of Stone is an action-comedy thriller with no brakes—because it never stops. More importantly, there is no glass ceiling. So when these women bump their heads, they’re making things happen.
I mention the invisible limits that are often placed on ‘she spies’ because the Rioters of Geek Girl Riot aren’t always satisfied with the portrayals of these women. Weirdly, we were in the past. However, newer movies like The 355 (2022) and The Mother (2023) have left us talking sh!t and feeling nothing.
When I wrote about The Mother at the time, I said, “The Mother is a terse and pointedly violent thriller that seeks to combine a remorseless crime drama with a mother-daughter saga. It nearly works but there are gaps in the story, as though long sequences are missing, making for a movie that is as emotionally distant as its lead.”
There was a consensus of eye-rolling from Day, Renee, and me regarding The 355. I wrote, “Have you heard the term ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’? When it comes to The 355, the cast is willing but the script is weak … You get the feeling the script was leveled down to what was erroneously believed to be the limits of women agents. There is no sparkle, The 355 doesn’t make you believe these characters are singularly capable of pulling off the incredible, it’s just a flashback episode of 2000s TV. You’ll be able to call out every story beat before it happens and yell out every one-liner before they’re said.”
Earlier films had their problems, but the women had no limits in their spycraft. La Femme Nikita relaunched the sub-genre after a long pause and remains its most influential entry. It likely inspired The Heroic Trio (1993), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), the reboot of Charlie’s Angels (2000), and its own doppelganger in the 2003 remake, The Point of No Return. Meanwhile, the Ghost in the Shell manga made female-fronted espionage happen since 1989. Long before its small screen debut in 1995, which lead to the 1996 movie. These properties pushed their leads to shatter the glass ceiling and weaponize the shards to slice their way past anyone soft-brained enough to challenge their missions. Beyond that, they had fully rendered personalities, backstories, and self-determination—even in worlds run by men.
Later films, like Lust, Caution (2007), Salt (2010), Atomic Blonde (2017), Red Sparrow (2018), and even the maligned Black Widow (2021), pulled off similar depth in their leads—to varying degrees of greatness or scrunched faced confusion. Whether we bought into the plots or not, we were never bored. We believed each of these spies could do almost anything or talk someone into doing it for them.
The above is the goalpost if a woman led spy flick is going to mesmerize us with its action and its characters. Heart of Stone qualifies in that category. The women have widely varied personalities. Their skill sets differ, even when they are rival hackers. They don’t feel like they’ve been sitting in a storage locker waiting to fill the exact same role as the sidelined women we see too often. Instead, the writers find ways to make their morals, guiding principles, and personal missions both clear and diverse. I wanted more development in the relationship between Stone (Gadot) and Nomad (Okonedo) but maybe that’s on the way. Heart of Stone may not be my favorite femme-spy movie, but I want to see more of these women and I want to know how heroic they can be. I supposed that means it works on a baseline level. Let me know what you think when you see it.
