Directed By F. Gary Gray

Starring – Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sam Worthington

The Plot – Follows a master thief (Hart) and his ex-girlfriend (Mbatha-Raw), now an Interpol agent, who team up to steal $100 million in gold bullion being transported on a 777 passenger flight.

Rated PG-13 for violence and action, suggestive material and some adult language.

Lift | Official Trailer | Netflix (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

Very few things materialize towards garnered momentum for the film, but once you’ve had a look at the intoxicating scope and scale within the lavish budget, involving luxurious automobiles, high-tech planes and futuristic set decoration, you start to understand that most, if not all, of the film’s budget went towards presenting an image of success towards its characters. This makes it all the easier to buy into the globe-trotting and monetary stakes within the film’s conflict, but beyond that vividly taps into a consistency for a culture that many of us will never come into direct contact with, which in turn proves the success rate for these characters and their career objectives. Beyond this, I found many of the performances from a talented ensemble to be a bit underwhelming, with the exception of Kingpin himself, Vincent D’Onofrio, who completely goes against type as a wacky master of disguise within our lead group of thieves. As to where D’Onofrio is known to play these desparate madmen who command respect inside of dangerously sinister actions, his turn here as Denton comically commands attention throughout a film that quite too often takes itself far too seriously, with Vincent’s own unique approach granting us insight into the movie we rightfully should’ve received. While his time is limited in the focus of Hart and Mbatha-Raw’s distinction as dual protagonists, it still leaves plenty of time for Vincent to occasionally step in and steal each scene with chewing of otherwise stern scenery, affording us a vantage point towards his terrific comedic timing, which I hope he will use to further break typecasting and accepting more comic heavy roles. Lastly, at merely 90 minutes, “Lift” never has time to overstay its welcome or overcomplicate its execution, instead serving as the kind of film that is ideal background noise for Netflix users, as they seek something that doesn’t require too much thinking or attention. This might sound like a back-handed compliment for the proceedings, but Gray’s direction constantly feeds into an enveloping urgency for the developments of the narrative and dynamic of the group that expresses the ever-changing circumstances of the world of intellectual theft, and while it doesn’t always make the most of its minutes, I can’t ever say that the duration of the film tested my patience with unrelenting boredom.

NEGATIVES

Make a list of every cliche that you know inside of the heist subgenre, and I’m quite sure that you will find the entirety of them inside of this heavily flawed and lazy form of artistic expression, cementing a film that I feel is the living embodiment of Artificial Intelligence. I think this for a lot of reasons, but for starters the fact that Netflix has produced a heist film with a randomly assembled ensemble at least once a year since its inception as a streaming giant. Don’t believe me? consider “Army of Thieves”, “Triple Frontier”, “Red Notice”, “Kaleidoscope”, “Da 5 Bloods”, and “6 Underground” to be just a few of the films they’ve produced with arguably the same idea in concept. On top of this, the screenplay is heavily predictable and thematically flat, with some of the most heavy-handed dialogue guiding its characters throughout interactions that lack authenticity towards even believable speech patterns. Every scene feels so heavy handed and obvious that you just know it will echo relevance at some random point in the duration of the engagement, and as if by some unforeseen freak luck of grand timing, it always does. In addition to this, the characters are written and presented as bland and lifeless as a film this close to rudimentary can capably conjure, with one-dimensional outlines and corresponding performances from a usually gifted ensemble to waste away the summoning of their appearances. This is especially the case for Hart’s Cyrus, who refreshingly plays things entirely straight with this performance, but it never leads towards anything meaningful to sacrifice the familiar elements of his three-dimensional charisma, instead forcing him to forcefully act reserved and whisper his dialogue in ways that would make Vin Diesel and his belching of dialogue proud. For everyone else, they fall into the kind of types that heist movies appraise with their respective roles for one another, in everything from “The Techie”, to “The Engineer”, that surmizes everything that you are ever going to learn about them. While I expected each of them to never stray far from their objectives inside of this group, I’m shocked that a film can’t even waste a single solitary scene of exposition between them to hammer home some semblance of home life beyond this dangerous career, but even that would be giving this film far more credit than it rightfully deserves. Even Jean Reno’s villain is drastically underscored to the point that he falls by the wayside of every dangerously rich foreigner who you’ve ever met in these movies, with only three scenes paid to his automic rendering, with one of which serving as the anticlimatic ending that resolves this film as abruptly as a cartoon slipping on a banana peel. That rushed and consequentially unfulfilling resolution equally lends itself consistently towards the appeal of the various action set pieces, which waste away abundance of potential in everything from the director to the gravity-twisting situations that could and should conjure something unique at 40,000 feet. When you remember Gray to be the same man who steered films like “The Italian Job” and “The Negotiator”, your expectations go through the roof, but as the sequences are plagued by choppy editing, inconsistent fight choreography and alienating camera angles plagued by claustrophobia and contortion, you start to remember that Gray is the same man responsible for “The Fate of the Furious”, which I still helm as the weakest of the entire Fast franchise. But contrary to that aforementioned film garnering a spectacle in devastation that is at least fun in stupid ways, the action here lacks any kind of intensity or suspense to their depiction, leaving “Lift” stalled on even the most expected appeals towards its favor. Finally, and most importantly, the special effects with this film still prove that Netflix has many miles to travel before they can competently compete with the silver screen, especially those of on-the-ground backdrops, which are cloaked in the kind of green-screen studio influences that have to be seen to be believed. Because budgetary limitations can only allow streaming services to do so much with intoxicating imagery or disastrous devastation, I have come to expect that not everything can be authentic in the context of legitimacy, but that doesn’t comfortably explain why elements like a mansion or cliffside waterfall have to graphically staged. While this aspect remains prominent throughout the duration of the film, its deepest consistency stems from the film’s final fifteen minutes, where everything minus the characters lacks tangibilities or even colorful consistency with the environments that are manufactured, in turn crafting an unflattering hue that outlines the actors with about as much obviousness as suppressed disbelief can capably fight off.

OVERALL
“Lift” is proof that Netflix quality is dragging by the wayside of grounded expectations and derivative outlines that rub so many of its films together, regardless of quality. Despite a razor thin run time and stacked ensemble, the film is plagued by overwhelming predictability and creative laziness that keep it from ever standing out to even a non-paying audience, leading to another disappointing descent in the career of F. Gary Gray, whose lack of ambition leads to an experience that steals many things, but your time being the biggest of those values.

My Grade: 3/10 or F+