Kevin Hart isn’t an action star, but he keeps creeping his way towards becoming one. Typically, he does it through comedy in such films as Ride Along, The Man from Toronto, his parody series Die Hart, and cameo in Hobbs & Shaw. But Hart comes closest to reaching the destination in Lift, another of those bloated, big budget, entertaining star-driven spectacles that Netflix loves so much and that audiences will quickly forget, like Red Notice and The Gray Man before it.
If Now You See Me wasn’t itself a heist movie, then I’d say Lift was the Now You See Me of heist movies. Utterly consumed by its star power and the gimmick-driven plot, the film stars Hart as Cyrus, leader of a ragtag group of elite thieves, each with their own special skill. The cast is full of actors firmly settled under the Netflix umbrella. There’s Vincent D’Onofrio as Denton, a master of disguises with multiple personalities to match; Billy Magnussen as Magnus, the team’s wild card safecracker; Ursula Corbero as Camila, the team’s resident wheelwoman/pilot; and a handful of others willing to take big risks for the big score.
We meet the crew as they’re pulling off a Venice auction house theft of an NFT; and no it’s not one of those special Donald Trump brand NFTs. This is from N8 (Jacob Batalon), a mysterious Banksy-esque digital artist whose work sells in the millions. It doesn’t totally go off without a hitch. They’re spotted by dogged Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who shares a brief romantic past with Cyrus. A wild boat chase ensues, but the team is dead to rights. They’re afforded one chance at freedom, and it’s to pull off a near-impossible job. Steal $500M in gold from a terrorist (Jean Reno) who is having it transported in a vault at 40,000 feet aboard an airplane.
The plot is ridiculous, and to screenwriter Daniel Kunka’s credit, the solution is just as absurd. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Lift is the most enjoyable of Netflix’s globe-hopping genre films. They all sport a familiar pattern; lots of exotic locales, and visually appealing international stars who are hard to look away from. When the gang gets together, they bounce jokes off of each other rapid fire, displaying their single character trait easily. You won’t find much to separate Lift from a raft of other “cool” heist movies, but you’ll have a good time with it nonetheless.
It’s been five years since F. Gary Gray directed The Fate of the Furious, twenty years since his remake of The Italian Job, and twenty-seven years since his debut, Set It Off. You could say that Lift is almost an amalgam of all three. Gray isn’t the most exciting filmmaker around, but he’s better at capturing the chase than he’s given credit for, and moves the action at a breezy pace while affording his stars the spotlight they deserve. As such, Hart stands head and shoulders above, even in a packed ensemble such as this. Dropping fewer punchlines than I think he ever has before, Hart is the steady center of Lift‘s ridiculous high-flying robbery plot, and helps it to stick the landing.
Lift is streaming on Netflix now.
