There are lots of beautiful people making movies, but Gal Gadot has a face that’s interesting in a way that’s rare. She’s like Greta Garbo, in that all she has to do is lift an eyebrow in close-up and the movie stops: Oh, look at that. Her eyebrowdoesthat.

It’s a face that deserves a huge setting — not bombs, not explosions, not a worldwide canvas of international intrigue, but emotional hugeness, as in “Camille,” “Hedda Gabler,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Seagull.” Hers is a face meant for the classics, not well-made garbage like “Heart of Stone.”

But “Heart of Stone” is what we’ve got, a Netflix action movie clearly intended to launch Gadot in an action franchise, as though she needs another one. On the plus side, “Heart of Stone” has one advantage over “Wonder Woman”: This time Gadot gets to radiate the intelligence of a sentient human rather than the smug obliviousness of a superhero.

“Heart of Stone” is directed by Tom Harper, who made “The Aeronauts” (2019) and a very respectable “War and Peace” miniseries back in 2016 (the second-best rendering of that classic, after the 1966 Russian version). In this film, whenever Harper gets to do nothing but direct, as in the action scenes, “Heart of Stone” works. It’s in the convolutions of its flat script that the movie falls apart.

Gadot plays Rachel, a secret agent who works for a vague global entity known as the Charter, whose mission is to head off every possible catastrophe and keep the world running smoothly. To that end, Rachel has been working undercover for British intelligence. That is, she is working alongside British agents and pretending to be one of them, when actually she’s with the Charter.

Right off, the movie is dramatically at cross purposes. Because she’s not really a British agent, the audience regards anything she does as a British agent as being of secondary importance. Yet the audience has no reason to care about the Charter, either, because its aims are so vague. There’s really no reason to care about anything — except for every time the camera is on Gadot. Then you get to ask yourself whether the human face has reached some final stage of perfection.

If only Rachel’s mission weren’t so vague. A hundred years ago, a silent villain might tie a woman to some train tracks and the whole audience would root for the hero to free her, because the danger was human scale and the possible consequences were unmistakable. But today, filmmakers make movies in which the whole world or the whole universe or the whole multiverse might blow up, and that’s just too big and unspecific to register.

In “Heart of Stone,” there’s a superweapon called the Heart, and guess what it controls? Everything! Not just one or two big things, but absolutely everything! (Are you scared yet?) And a gifted hacker (Alia Bhatt) and a ruthless maniac are trying to get hold of it. Why? So they can do — oh, who knows? Bad things! Definitely bad!

You don’t care, do you? I saw the whole movie and I didn’t, either.

瑞秋的任务是阻止他们,这里的re, it’s fun watching her try. She jumps out of a plane, floats down and lands on a dirigible. She drives a snowmobile and a motorcycle and creates a makeshift device to zipline down a mountain pass. But “Heart of Stone” is not “Dr. No.” The characters aren’t there and the whole mushy concept of the Charter is dead on arrival.

Let’s hope this is not the beginning of a secret-agent franchise.

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com