Lift has many advantages. First off, there is an amazing and endearing group of talented actors in the new Kevin Hart-led heist thriller, who all appear genuinely excited to be involved. To further enhance its charming image, the movie belongs to a subgenre that is probably the most popular for casual, laid-back pleasure. Heist thrillers, however, require a certain level of cinematography, which Netflix’s most recent feature film blatantly lacks, regardless of whether it is directed by Steven Soderbergh or, as in the case of Lift, F. Gary Gray.
Lift as a whole has an air of incompleteness. The movie appears to have been thrown together quickly because of the way its editing is intentionally jumbled and erratic, and all of the exterior sequences have uniform lighting. Although its cast’s likeability keeps it from ever being too dull, it also doesn’t really impress you. Like so many previous Netflix originals, the movie looks certain to be forgotten in the separate filmographies of all of its actors.
Lift is both a group thriller and a brand-new role for Kevin Hart, the primary actor. A year before Lift opens, the film features popular comedian-turned-actor Cyrus Whitaker, a master art thief who is relentlessly chased by Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a determined Interpol agent who had a brief affair with him. The movie follows Cyrus after Abby asks him to assist Interpol in bringing down Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno), a formidable investment banker who secretly finances terrorist acts in order to influence global stock markets to his advantage. For all of their prior offenses, Cyrus and his group of robbers will be granted complete legal immunity in return.
However, it won’t be simple to remove Jorgensen. In addition to collaborating to steal $500 million worth of gold bars from the powerful, well-known criminal, Abby, Cyrus, and his group will need to make sure they don’t let him know about the robbery until it’s too late. In order to accomplish this, they will need to grab the gold bars when the jet is flying over Europe and not land. It’s an extravagant robbery that makes sense for a movie as pulpy as Lift, and it sets up a ton of visually stunning set pieces and stunts.
Sadly, Lift never lives up to the potential that it has. The film’s heist, which primarily takes place on two planes and an air traffic control tower, is made more difficult by the uninspired sets and the strangely empty core passenger jet. Lift’s outside aerial shots are enhanced with computer-generated imagery (CGI) that may not be as graphic as viewers may have grown accustomed to, but it still makes Lift’s climactic scene more difficult to sell as a potentially fatal situation. The screenplay by Daniel Kunka, which comes up with progressively absurd ways to keep its characters stuck on a path that they should be able to easily veer off of, further detracts from the film.
Big-budget action movies and robbery thrillers are nothing new to Gray. Though Lift lacks the technical finesse of many of the director’s earlier works, his credentials span from Friday and Set it Off to The Italian Job and Straight Outta Compton. The film’s purposefully overexposed and visually bland image sanitizes the already underdeveloped romantic plot between Mbatha-Raw’s Abby and Hart’s Cyrus, as well as the supposed eroticism of its crime plot. Although the latter feels particularly reminiscent of a similar storyline involving Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Ocean’s Twelve (2004), Lift lacks the cinematic sensuality that travel-the-world romantic criminal capers like it need due to its low-budget TV look.
The amount of money that was obviously and transparently spent on Lift is what makes that specific shortcoming all the more annoying. The movie has a grandiose sense of scale and includes several breathtaking real-life locations. What makes the movie so peculiar is in part its wisdom in not trying to imitate the European cities and villages, but rather its lack of technical perfection in making them shine. It doesn’t know how to put all the pieces together, but it has all it takes to be a lighthearted, unforgettable heist comedy. In a similar vein, the movie fails to make the most of its ensemble, which includes memorable performers like Vincent D’Onofrio from Echo, Billy Magnussen, Úrsula Corberó, and Yun Jee Kim in supporting roles.
Magnussen and Corberó, who play additional members of Cyrus’ team, also shine out, and D’Onofrio, as the master of disguise Denton, deliciously chews up the scenery. Hart, on the other hand, seems to be continuously muting his own inherent charisma in favor of adopting a stiffer, less natural image. As a flirty, Danny Ocean-esque leading man, Hart isn’t really believable. If he doesn’t try to move even more away from the humorous energy that initially made him a sensation, it’s not difficult to see him directing a movie similar to Lift in the future. Though his act doesn’t quite come together to work, it’s clear what he’s trying to do.
