Directed by F. Gary Gray
Written by Daniel Kunka
The heist movie is among my favorite genre of movies. It’s usually just so reliable and entertaining, even with varying levels of quality, it’s the type of movie that I can typically glean some semblance of pleasure from. Netflix and Kevin Hart bring our first such movie into 2024, Lift. It follows all the conventions of the standard heist movie, with a large team of unique individuals, thrilling ideas and sequences, deceit and scheming. The film is even structured with an initial heist to show the teams bona fides, and then leads into the main course thievery. On paper, with this cast, this director, this story, Lift should be a no-brainer entertainer. So what happened, because this is just about as bland, predictable and boring of a caper movie as I’ve maybe ever seen?
Cyrus (Kevin Hart) and his renowned team of thieves (Vincent D’Onofrio, Ursula Corbero, Billy Magnussen, Yun Jee Kim and Viveik Kalra), each with their own specialty from hacker, master of disguise, pilot, etc., are on a job to rob an auction of NFT, but when things go wrong, they end up caught stealing something different. As penance, Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who has a history with Cyrus, offers them a deal: help Interpol catch international monster Jorgensen (Jean Reno), who pays for terrorist attacks and profits by shorting the markets affected. The team, forced to agree to the near suicide mission, hatch an elaborate plan to steal half a billion in gold bullion from a commercial airliner. But can they really pull off the heist of a lifetime, with all their lives on the line?
Lift, as previously mentioned, has all the hallmarks of an international, sexy heist movie. It has recognizable faces, takes us to exotic locales like Venice, the Alps and Tuscany. It has cool tech, slick looks and high wire acts. So then why does it all fall so flat? To start, this is an obvious homage (rip-off?) of Ocean’s Twelve, a heist movie set in Europe where one of the leads has a romantic past with a Interpol officer? The problem is Steven Soderbergh wasn’t involved in this project. It lacks the witty dialogue, slick editing, and near perfect pacing. It also lacks that cast. While filled with names and faces you’ll know, this is the bargain bin version of that movie, and it shows. There is a lack of charisma and movie star quality, starting right from the lead, Kevin Hart. Hart is a good comedic actor, but he can’t carry the suave action lead here.
The movie is also just trying too hard. While some of the action sequences, particularly the boat chase in the Venice canals and the fight sequence in a turbulent airplane, are impressive examples of stunt work from the filmmakers, I think most of the movie thinks it’s way cooler than it really is. The tech on display isn’t that interesting, the disguises not that memorable, and perhaps the cardinal sin of a movie like this: the twists and secretive plans are so predictable as to be opaque. There are no surprises, and the plotting is not nearly as smart as it needs to be in order to pull a job and a screenplay like this off. Whether it’s a fault of the script itself, or the directing from veteran F. Gary Gray, or more likely a combination of both, there are some serious failings here which hold the movie back from being a hit.
Ultimately, it really doesn’t take much though within this genre to really hold the attention of the viewer for 100 minutes. Lift is fine in that regard, and I had fun along the way at times. But it’s just not something I will think about in the next week, month, or years to come. An instantly forgettable movie, thrown into the bin of Netflix movies of the same ilk which seem flashy and shiny and new when they’re announced and finally arrived. It will spend it’s pre-requisite week on the streaming services top 10 list and never be heard from again. It will be forgotten by the end of the year. Heist movies have one of the highest floors in terms of likelihood to be good, at least according to my tastes. Lift is about as close to that floor as anything I’ve seen in a long time.
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