Lift (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Follows a master thief and his Interpol Agent ex-girlfriend who team up to steal $500 million in gold bullion being transported on an A380 passenger flight.

My Take – A crack team of professional criminals, each with their own unique set of skills, planning to execute a high stakes, high danger, and high reward job is the basic synopsis of probably every heist flick.

While each entry into the genre has seen their own set of results, their success is usually measured by how mesmerized we are left with on-goings on screen, along with the likability of the characters involved in the said thievery.

And though director F. Gary Gray seemed to be the right kind of filmmaker to pull off a charmer for Netflix, considering he helmed The Italian Job (2003) remake and The Fate of the Furious (2017), however, despite the presence of Kevin Hart, with whom the streamer has a lucrative output deal, the whole experience is strangely inert.

It certainly has a lot of resources behind it and clear eyes at a franchise play, yet the biggest sin it commits is that it never garners interest, and most shockingly, Kevin Hart who is usually the funniest one in the room is not once funny in the film. Add to that the cookie cutter script/story, and very bad CGI, this one becomes a very difficult film to get through.

Sure, the likability of the cast prevents it from ever becoming too dreary of an affair, but it never wins you over, either. Making it one of those many Netflix originals that seems destined to become a forgotten title in its ever growing catalogue.

The story follows Cyrus Whitaker (Kevin Hart), a master art thief, who is constantly pursued by Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a determined Interpol agent who shared a brief fling with him a year before. However, following his latest lift of an NFT, Abby is informed by her superior Agent Huxley (Sam Worthington) that her investigation is being suspended so Cyrus and his team, which consists of Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), Camila (Úrsula Corberó), Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Mi-Sun (Kim Yoon-ji), and Luke (Viveik Kalra), can be used in taking down Lars Jorgenson (Jean Reno).

Jorgenson is a powerful investment banker who secretly funds terrorist attacks that he then uses to manipulate the world’s stock markets in his favor. In exchange of full legal immunity for all of their past crimes, Cyrus and his team have to stop Jorgenson’s transference of $500 million worth of gold bars to pay off the notorious hacker group Leviathan.

But taking down Jorgensen won’t be easy, as Abby, Cyrus, and his crew will have to work together to not only steal from the formidable, internationally known criminal, but they’ll also have to do it without alerting him to the theft until it’s too late.

To do so, they’ll have to lift the gold bars while they are being transported across Europe on a plane without landing it. Setting up a fittingly over-the-top heist for a film as pulpy as this one, opening the door for plenty of cinematic, eye-popping set pieces and stunts.

Unfortunately, the film never fulfills the promise of its potential. Yes, director Gray knows how to keep a film like this looking nice and slick with solid establishment of action and location. With heist films, the plot and mechanisms are often firmly in place with little leeway for deviation so the film needs to rely on creating compelling characters, thrilling action beats, and snappy dialogue which sadly, this one neglects with the characters and dialogue.

Mainly as the films script just struggles to take off, bogged down by predictable twists and well-worn heist tropes. The humor, similarly, loses altitude, relying on forced gags and groan-worthy puns. Even the heist, which is set mostly in two planes and an air traffic control tower, is hampered by the blandness of its sets and the inexplicable emptiness of its central passenger aircraft.

The CGI used to bring its exterior aerial shots to life isn’t as egregious as modern viewers have gotten used to, but it also makes it that much more difficult for the film’s climax to sell its purportedly life-and-death stakes.

The biggest problem being that the film doesn’t use any of the assets at its disposal in a way that benefits the film. Most of the cast, for instance, fails to establish any sense of character. They aren’t necessarily bad in their roles. They just don’t effectively portray fully realized people, and it’s hard to tell if the actors are hindered by lackluster material, or if they’re acting poorly.

Indeed, Kevin Hart is a total miscast. Hart isn’t entirely convincing as a flirtatious, Danny Ocean-esque leading man, and he seems to be constantly muting his own innate charisma in favor of embracing a stiffer, less natural persona. Only if he hadn’t shied away from the comedic energy that made him a star in the first place. It’s easy to see what he’s going for here, but his performance just doesn’t come together enough to really work.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is certainly an improvement over him. The two’s chemistry is a key selling point to this material and aside from a sequence in which they have to fake having sex in an airplane bathroom the romantic spark you expect from a film like this never comes through.

Though, Billy Magnussen brings the expected few sparks to the proceedings, Sam Worthington, Viveik Kalra, Kim Yoon-Ji, Úrsula Corberó, Burn Gorman, Paul Anderson, and even Vincent D’Onofrio are simply just wasted here. Jacob Batalon is okayish in a cameo. Jean Reno is basically a rent-a-villain and there’s nothing that really stands out with him as an antagonist. On the whole, ‘Lift’ is a mediocre formulaic heist thriller that wastes its exceedingly talented cast.