We have seen heist-centered action/thriller hybrids like Lift before. Indeed, we have even previously seen them from director F. Gary Gray, a veteran of this particular subgenre and of big, franchise-ready filmmaking of the type that his newest movie would desperately like to be. It boasts a big, international ensemble of actors who all wouldn’t really go together in any movie other than one like this, which depends on diverse personalities to bring some life to the material. It doesn’t help, though, that Daniel Kunka’s screenplay was seemingly developed by plugging its characters into a formula and simply running with the result.
The movie is a little better than that summary makes it sound, if only because of the many reliable comforts of the heist subgenre, which so often requires a suspension of disbelief and an overlooking of minor inconsistencies. There is something inherently fun about watching intelligent people outwit other intelligent people, all in the name of petty crime. Gray has pulled this off before, and at least this new one is engaging in a very broad sense. The director has proven that he can do better, but the result could also have been a lot worse.
The one undeniable disadvantage Lift has in comparison to its more successful contemporaries involves the strange choices made by some of the actors, and a general lack of engagement from others. Kevin Hart drops his comic persona in the role of Cyrus, the leader of a crew of art thieves who, in the opening sequence, have graduated to stealing a nonfungible token. That’s definitely a weird way to start a heist movie, but then again, one supposes that the genre evolves as new things to steal enter the zeitgeist. Anyway, his crew is played by the likes of Úrsula Corberó, Billy Magnussen, Yunjee Kim, Viveik Kalra and Vincent D’Onofrio, each of whose characters gets a freeze-frame introduction for some reason.
Some of these performances are frankly bizarre, from how uncharacteristically distant Hart seems to be to the weirdly enunciated dialogue, delivered in an equally weird dialect, from D’Onofrio. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is a much better sport as Abby Gladwell, the Interpol agent tracking the thieves’ heist under the watchful thumb of her boss, Huxley (Sam Worthington). Instead of arresting them, Huxley and Gladwell offer the thieves an ultimatum: help Interpol steal back a large sum of money from the scheming Jorgenson (Jean Reno) or face some serious jail time.
Again, this is a good cast, undone by a tepid screenplay and a director who doesn’t really know what to do beyond inserting these players into an action-heavy plot and letting it go on autopilot. We get some silly stuff that’s a lot of fun, such as the various machinations and skullduggery involved in trying to infiltrate Jorgenson’s inner circle. There’s a lot of overtly goofy business, too, most egregiously the building of a plane capable of eluding all enemy radar– including multiple countries’ military might. Lift is pretty lightweight, but it’s also disposable in ways that are less easy to overlook.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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