Lift overview: Netflix’s dismal Kevin Hart heist movie sinks like a stone

Lift, the brand new Netflix motion caper starring Kevin Hart, is a roguish, high-tech heist movie about an unlikely band of desperadoes utilizing their thieving expertise to save lots of the world. Its makers, led by director F. Gary Gray and Hart as a producer, are clearly attempting to triangulate a spot someplace between the Ocean’s motion pictures, the Fast and Furious franchise, and Mission: Impossible. It’s tempting to say it will get about as near these as a Hallmark movie does to a basic Meg Ryan romantic comedy, however that might be unfair to Hallmark motion pictures. Hallmark motion pictures have their very own vibe, a soothing blandness that’s no less than partially the purpose. Lift, like a lot of Netflix’s motion output, is a characterless, garish simulacrum that isn’t satisfying on any stage.

It isn’t fooling anybody, nonetheless. You solely have to see a single body of Lift, taken previous the 10-minute mark, to know one thing’s flawed. During these first 10 minutes, we’re launched to Cyrus Whitaker (Hart) and his crew of worldwide artwork thieves: grasp of disguise Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen), engineer Luc (Viveik Kalra), and hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim). We watch them undertake a daring artwork heist at a simultaneous public sale in Venice and London, proper underneath the nostril of Interpol agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). The heist is passably entertaining and there’s an precise speedboat chase, filmed on location in Venice.

Then, abruptly, the movie lurches into a cheesy unreality it inhabits for the remainder of its 104-minute run time. The crew make their escape and arrive on a super-yacht that’s poorly rendered CGI with out, and brightly lit soundstage inside. There, they sit round and clarify how they pulled off the world’s first theft of priceless NFT artwork, an already retro idea which exactly carbon-dates Daniel Kunka’s screenplay to 2020-2021. The remainder of the movie is shot nearly totally on soundstages, and has the flat lighting, glassy images, and flimsy FX which can be the unhappy emblems of most Netflix Original motion pictures. Nothing about it seems actual.

Photo: Matt Towers/Netflix

That’s a dangerous begin for a supposedly globe-trotting journey. The motion strikes to faux London: Mbatha-Raw’s Abby manages to pin the Venice heist on Denton, which she then makes use of to blackmail Cyrus’ crew into pulling a job for the nice guys, on the behest of anti-terror agent Huxley (Sam Worthington). They want to search out a approach to steal half a billion {dollars} of gold belonging to billionaire baddy Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno) to cease him from funding a world terror marketing campaign that he’ll use to quick the markets.

Cyrus concludes that the one method to do that is whereas the gold is being transported (by passenger plane, for some motive) between London and Zurich — in midair, utilizing a custom-made second plane to fly proper underneath the airliner, “steal” its radar signature, and idiot air site visitors management. Naturally, Abby and Cyrus have a romantic historical past, and naturally, he persuades her to hitch the group.

That’s a ludicrous setup, but it surely has some enjoyable potential: Cinema has a proud historical past of enjoyable stunts that includes planes flying shut to one another, in such twisty and purposeful motion potboilers as 1996’s Executive Decision. Lift seems low-cost, has perfunctory characterization, and is feeble in its makes an attempt at humor — but when it no less than pulled off a cleverly conceived heist, it could nonetheless get its job completed.

Instead, it fails at that, too. It’s nearly spectacular how lots of the set-piece’s threads fizzle out and lead nowhere, and what number of alternatives for motion and stress are bungled or allowed to slide by. Multiple members of Cyrus’ group have barely something to do, stranded by the fuzzy mechanics of the plot and the half-assed characterization. A final-minute twist can’t save the hopeless anticlimax that preceded it. Lift seems and sounds like a heist movie (kind of), however Kunka and Gray haven’t completed the work to construct one.

Image: Netflix

Even extra baffling is the miscasting. This is a Kevin Hart movie the place Kevin Hart doesn’t even get to be Kevin Hart — by design, presumably, given his producer credit score. Cyrus doesn’t crack smart or work up any high-key comedian bluster. Hart goes for a charismatic cool-customer factor, an unflappable group chief like a Danny Ocean or an infinitely extra laid-back Ethan Hunt. It’s a disastrously dangerous match for his power, and he simply flatlines, leaving a recreation Mbatha-Raw mugging into a vacuum to compensate.

Magnussen works laborious to land a few laughs; I’m undecided what D’Onofrio thought he was doing, however he appears to search out it amusing, which is one thing, I suppose. Everyone else seems misplaced, particularly Worthington and Reno within the roles of plot mechanics with inappropriate accents. They appear to surrender in bored desperation midway by most of their strains, and who can blame them?

Gray is able to higher than this. His 2003 remake of The Italian Job handed muster, his NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton was persuasive, and The Fate of the Furious isn’t absolutely the worst Fast movie. Even his final flop, Men in Black: International, confirmed extra indicators of life and originality than Lift. But these have been all actual motion pictures, even when they weren’t nice ones. Lift is barely a movie in any respect. It’s an empty, shiny stand-in for one. It’s the sparkly decoy the thieves swap for the actual factor whereas nobody is wanting.

Lift is streaming on Netflix now.