Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lift’ on Netflix, a Kevin Hart Action-Comedy Aimed At An International Streaming Audience

Kevin Hart plus F. Gary Gray plus Netflix equals Lift, an action-comedy programmer that takes the disposable Brett Ratner formula and reimagines it for an international streaming audience. So, joining the crossover funnyman-slash-Netflix staple and the veteran director (of Friday, one of the Fast/Furious movies, Straight Outta Compton, etc.) is a diverse cast with considerable Euro/Asian appeal, making it all the easier for tens of millions of people to consume cinematic junk food and likely push it into Netflix’s Top 10, if not the no. 1 spot, for a weekend or two. Is that how transparent the algorithm-formula has become? I’m afraid so.

LIFT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The setting: Venice, a fancy-ass art auction. Cyrus (Hart) walks in and plops down. He communicates via teeny-tiny spy-gear earpieces with his crew. Some are on-site, others are in London, stealing a Van Gogh while he starts the bidding at $12 million for an NFT concocted by a mystery guy in a hoodie and a gold MF Doomish mask. They’re definitely getting away with the Van Gogh heist, because Abby The Interpol Agent (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has eyes on Cyrus. He’s the distraction, and the distraction becomes a speedboat chase through the canals, which is an AHA moment, as in, AHA! THAT’S why they set this sequence in Venice! Cyrus shakes Abby The Interpol Agent and nobody’s the wiser about the Van Gogh and all is right with the crime-doing today. Huzzah.

Now let’s meet the crew: Cyrus is The Boss. Camila (Ursula Corbero) is The Pilot. Magnus (Billy Magnusson) is The Safecracker. Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim) is The Hacker. Luke (Viveik Kalra) is The Engineer. Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio) is The Master of Disguise. Their purpose is, in Cyrus’ words, to “rescue works of art from undeserving owners.” See, they justify theft by only stealing from absurdly rich people, and that makes us like them more than if they were snatching pearls from little old ladies. But who are they selling the art to for far-huger-than-tidy profits, then? See, I found a plot hole. It’s right there. May I suggest they sell it to absurdly rich people and then steal it back and then sell it to different absurdly rich people, etc.? That’d be quite the scam. It might also be beside the point, which is mindless entertainment. We’re not supposed to think about these things. We’re supposed to be too busy laughing at the one-liners and savoring the twists and turns and action-movie thrills. 

Back to the plot: That endeavor didn’t quite go as planned for the crew, which should have a name, like the Lifters or something. I mean, it’s right there in the title. But maybe they’d be mistaken for strength-training aficionados? Then again, that might throw others off their crime scent. Anyway, Abby The Interpol Agent knows all about the Van Gogh heist, and her boss (Sam Worthington), who is a total penis face, just a total mayor of Chodesville kind of guy, has her leveraging the Lifters. See, a zillionaire cretin (Jean Reno) is moving $500 million in gold bars for nefarious purposes, and she wants them to steal it and thwart his evil scheme. In return, she won’t throw them in the clink. 

Thing is, it won’t be easy. If it was too easy, it wouldn’t make for a movie that’s theoretically entertaining in its rampant convolutions. The heist requires them to use all kinds of gadgetry to hack into all kinds of things and crack a state-of-the-art safe, and also fly a crazy airplane very close to another, very large, airplane, and smuggle gadgetry-in-disguise onto the plane – Magnus gets the dildo-gadget, because he’s the Funny One – while also keeping an eye on the zillionaire cretin’s thugs. All this will require two things: One, a Plan So Crazy It Just Might Work. And two, a montage, because no heist movie worth its weight in digital streaming bits can go without a montage, especially a cheeky one full of Guy Ritchie voiceovers. Meanwhile, we learn that Cyrus and Abby The Interpol Agent have a past – they once spent a week together in Paris, presumably looking the other way from their chosen professions. Will the Plan be Crazy enough to Work? Will Cyrus and Abby The Interpol Agent only ever have Paris, or more than just Paris? NO SPOILERS, he said, despite knowing that you already know how it’ll all turn out.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I swear this movie lifts (sorry) its core likable-criminal-squad premise from The Bad Guys. The last time we saw crooks in a Netflix movie being offered immunity in exchange for helping the feds, it was the documentary Bitconned. And this thing kifes stuff from the usual heist-movie suspects – the Ocean’s movies, Guy Ritchie, etc. – as well as junk like Tower Heist and slick ’80s and ’90s action-comedies like Running Scared or Rush Hour.

Performance Worth Watching: You can just hear the paychecks being cashed (direct deposit transactions?) for this ruthlessly remedial project. I will say that Mbatha-Raw seems to be having some fun alongside Hart, and the two of them develop enough chemistry to be notable but not quite enough to be interesting.  

Memorable Dialogue: One of Hart’s crispy one-liners: “This isn’t emotional blackmail – it’s blackmail blackmail.”

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: Lift isn’t as ridiculous as Me Time, or as shrugworthy as The Man from Toronto, or as sporadically clever as The Gray Man, or as annoying as 6 Underground, or as soulless as Red Notice, or as nondescript as Spenser Confidential. But the one thing they have in common is, they’re all big-budget Netflix mediocrities featuring big-name stars and veteran directors, all slickly made, expensive-looking use-once-and-destroy movies. I don’t want to throw shade at Gray, a perfectly respectable filmmaker (Friday is forever, you know), but Lift adheres to the middle-of-the-road Netflix formula. He directs with plenty of professionalism but not much style beyond a handful of nifty, complex shots and an overabundance of LENS FLARE. Always with the LENS FLARE, these directors!

Gray’s working with a screenplay-o-matic script consisting of familiar cliches (crew of misfits, cop/crook romantic tension, hairbrained heist scheme, sneering villains, etc.) and a plot full of risks that get riskier and hitches in the plan that get hitchier. It piles up one damn thing after another and, as expected, the film deviates into big, dumb, noisy, violent junk during the third act. The cast finds a clever moment or three worth exploiting, but the characters are thinner than the pages of a 1980s comic book. Hart is reasonably appealing, and cultivates a bit of chemical interplay with Mbatha-Raw, but they’re handcuffed by perpetually bland material; as a prime example of this movie’s aversion to anything resembling creative risk, D’Onofrio, a premier scenery-chewer, is blended right into the bland porridge that’s the product of this ensemble. The goal is to churn up a few thrills and laughs, and Lift is functional in the most general sense, but man, I watch it and feel absolutely nothing. 

Our Call: Lift is relentlessly engineered to be escapism for a Friday night at home. When you’re tired. And might doze off in the middle of it. No matter who you are or what country you live in. It sells you on its star appeal and the promise of a joke here and a chase there. It fulfills everything it sets out to do – which isn’t much. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.