Plot: A band of expert criminals led by Cyrus Whitaker is recruited to do what they do best — lift $500 million in gold from a passenger plane— but they must do it mid-flight at 40,000 feet!
Review: The entire plot of the Quibi/Roku series Die Hart hinges on Kevin Hart wanting to break out of comedy roles so he can be taken seriously as an action hero. While that plot was played for laughs, it was not the first time Hart tried something different. Both his films The Upside and Fatherhood, as well as the Netflix limited series True Story gave Hart more opportunities to channel his dramatic talents, but Lift is the comedian’s first project that is straight action without the reliance on his being the butt of the joke. Cast in a role commonly saved for Hart’s friends Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg, Lift is a big-budget heist movie with a sense of humor and comedy from almost everyone in the cast aside from Hart himself. While fairly formulaic and not quite as polished as it could have been, Lift is nevertheless a fun and safe test run for Kevin Hart to take on the action genre in a serious way.
Lift focuses on Cyrus (Kevin Hart), the leader of a crew of notorious art thieves, including master of disguise Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), driver Camila (Money Heist’s Ursula Corbero), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen), hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), and engineer Luke (Viveik Kalra). On their trail is Agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an Interpol agent who shares a past with Cyrus. When an elusive arms dealer (Jean Reno) pops up on Interpol’s radar, Gladwell’s boss, Huxley (Sam Worthington), wants to offer Cyrus and his team immunity in exchange for stealing a shipment of gold. Forcing Cyrus and Abby to team up, the crew begins plotting how to steal the gold from a plane in mid-air in a plot twist that would be right at home in The Fast Saga or The Italian Job. Luckily, Lift comes from a director with experience with both: F. Gary Gray.
Running a brisk ninety-five minutes (after subtracting Netflix’s requisite ten minutes of credits), Lift is not a movie chock full of character development. The movie opens with a complex heist set between Venice and London involving NFTs and a boat chase through canals, something we usually see with Kevin Hart screaming at the top of his lungs. Instead, Hart plays Cyrus as suave, cool, and collected as he orchestrates his meticulous plan without missing a beat. The fact that Cyrus is as good at what he does takes away some of the tension from Lift, as it rarely feels like the plan will go wrong. Hart gets to check in with each crew member as they must devise unique and far-fetched solutions to accommodate the nigh-impossible mid-air robbery and spend the rest of the time flirting with Abby. Hart and Mbatha-Raw have decent chemistry here, but the most fun seems to be had by Vincent D’Onofrio and Billy Magnussen, who enjoy being the primary comedy relief in this movie.
With some insignificant turns by Jacob Batalon and Burn Gorman, most of Lift feels copied from countless other heist movies. The international cast lends the movie some new talent like Yun Jee Kim and Ursula Corbero, who more than prove their skills in an English-language production. The weakest elements of the movie are Sam Worthington, who is completely unnecessary in a throwaway role, and Jean Reno. Reno, who is a screen legend with roles in Mission: Impossible and The Professional, is oddly miscast as a Scandinavian with a thick French accent who mostly sits around doing nothing and brings minimal menace as a villain. The squarely PG-13 Lift has some mild profanity, some off-screen violence, and one scene featuring an orgasm that likely earned the rating. Other than that, there is not much in this movie we have not seen many times before. Still, it is amongst the more competent Netflix films in recent years and is on par with Apple’s recent hit, The Family Plan, in terms of entertainment value.
Written by Daniel Kunka (12 Rounds), Lift is F. Gary Gray’s first directorial effort since the awful Men in Black: International five years ago. While the opening Venice heist sequence had me hoping this movie would have the same energy as Gray’s 2003 version of The Italian Job, the movie devolves into a cheaper version of the filmmaker’s entry in Vin Diesel’s never-ending franchise, 2017’s The Fate of the Furious. The major set-piece of the final act involves the mid-air heist using a custom private jet with some cool upgrades but comes up short thanks to some truly shoddy CGI effects. I have seen some bad CGI before but had Lift premiered on the big screen, audiences would be ripping apart just how terrible the planes look here. What F. Gary Gray brings to Lift that helps rescue it from being a disaster, evoking a sense of style and cool. The eclectic cast all dress well and look hip as they traverse Europe, and not once did I doubt this cast as being anything but believable and rich criminals. No matter how generic the plot may be, this movie makes Kevin Hart a believable leading man.
As far as Kevin Hart movies go and other feature films premiering this month, Lift is worthy of a seven out of ten. Compared to other movies in the heist sub-genre, Lift does not do enough to set itself apart from the pack, nor does it raise the temperature above lukewarm. Taken by itself, the opening sequence is a lot of fun but sets a bar for the rest of the movie that it never gets close to reaching. I applaud Kevin Hart’s effort to go outside his comfort zone and play an action-oriented leading man role, but there is just not enough here to make Lift worth recommending beyond a cause watch if you have nothing else on your playlist. I like elements of Lift individually, including everyone cast as Cyrus’s crew, but outside of them, this movie does not come together like a good heist plan should.