Lift

Lift is Netflix’s newest nothing-burger of a film. I love heist films. Some of my favorite films come from this genre. But there was just absolutely nothing in this Fast and Furious-ripoff to love. The only thing this film stole was my time.

Kevin Hart, despite being a producer, feels like he didn’t even want to be there. Many of the characters don’t have any chemistry with each other – especially Hart and his love interest Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was the only one doing a halfway decent job by bringing actual emotion to her role. Most other characters were mere caricatures – the comedic relief, the techie, the master of disguise – that had no traits outside of the expected.

The plot is simple on paper, but they manage to make it super convoluted. The team needs to steal millions of dollars worth of gold from a plane before it lands. If they don’t, a literal supervillain will use the gold to pay a cyber company to flood any city on earth (it’s a little unclear on how that part works logistically). Most aspects of their “master plan” depend entirely on luck and leaps in logic wider than a canyon. Overall, the script, like most of this film, is a mess.

*Warning* If you choose to not to heed my warning and want to watch this, I’ll leave a spoiler warning for the ending of the film in this paragraph. The film ends, like most heist films, with a big reveal that they were actually doing something completely different than what we thought. (In Ocean’s Eleven, the fake security footage allowing them to rob the vault). In this film, it is revealed they not only were able to steal the gold, but they were able to drop it from the plane to retrieve later. This reveal is done so lazily and without any level of coolness. It is presented simply and casually, “oh by the way, this happened.” The reveal had the potential to be really cool, if they tried.

The real heist was getting Netflix to spend $100 million on this – an absurd budget for an absurd project. In different hands, this probably could’ve been made a lot better for a lot less money. I’m not sure what caused the budget to balloon that high, but it’s not for any reason you can see on screen.

I’ll be generous and give this a 3/10. I did laugh a few times at how absurd it was. There’s some “so bad it’s good” energy in there. Not much, but some.