Lift review – Kevin Hart a hard sell in ho-hum heist flick

Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

You know the Netflix formula: take a reliable box office trope – the big-budget action movie, the international spy thriller, the hitman and car chase bonanza – repackage it for the laptop screen with evermore disposable wrapping, attach a big name star with a hefty paycheck, release, move on. Such results – Sweet Girl, the Adam Project, the Gray Man, just to name a few – are often widely viewed yet under-discussed, throwaway blockbusters in the house style (overlit, frenetic) without much staying power or distinguishable flair. (To be fair to Netflix, this afflicts the other streaming services – does anyone remember Apple’s Ghosted?)

So there are well-worn and reduced expectations going into Lift, the latest collaboration between Netflix, comedian Kevin Hart and a tried and true concept (in this case, clever thieves with expensive toys and menacing bad guys). The film does little to outrun them. You know from the first minute, in which Hart’s debonair conman Cyrus Whitaker strolls confidently into a Venetian art auction, that this is a streaming action flick – stock characters, music video flairs, wealth porn, limp flashes of personality appealing to a low common denominator.

At least Lift, written by Daniel Kunka, enlists the multiplex-tested know-how of F Gary Gray, director of The Italian Job, Straight Outta Compton and Fast & Furious 8 (as well as such music videos as Ice Cube’s It Was a Good Day and TLC’s Waterfalls). The plot in Lift is dumb in a way that’s either entertaining or grating, depending on your preferences and current brain capacity. Such as: an opening heist plotline in Venice centered around an NFT, and then subsequent half-jokes about how NFTs were dismissed as a passing fad. But Gray knows how to direct a cacophonous action sequence, and the cat-and-mouse chase that plays out between Cyrus and Interpol officer Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in the canals of Venice is impressive and enjoyably stressful (I fear the wakes may sink the city faster).

Hart, usually cast as the wacky, hapless foil, the good guy doing his best or the everyman sidekick (such as in The Man from Toronto, a Netflix action flick I reviewed but had to Google, so little did it stick), plays against type here as a hyper-competent leader of a heist ring who, of course, only steals from people who deserve it. It’s an ill fit for his physical, loud brand of comedy, which can’t help but poke through his attempts at suave charisma. Hart delivers such straight-faced lines as “the rules were already broken for someone like me” with an awkward edge, like he’s itching for a punchline.

That line is used to (unconvincingly) charm Abby, with whom Cyrus once shared a five-day fling while both were undercover that curdled into distrust. For reasons that never make much sense but don’t need to, Abby’s boss Huxley (Sam Worthington, believably strained and skeevy) orders her to make peace with her art thief nemesis in the name of world peace; if Cyrus and his crew don’t nick $50m worth of gold bars while in transit from London to Zurich, then arch-evil billionaire Lars Jorgenson (Jean Reno) will pay hackers to wreak havoc for profit (he’s shorted some stocks, or something; Northern Irish henchmen are involved.)

If this sounds like a bastardized version of Ocean’s 11 with a Fast and Furious flavor, you would be correct. Still, Hart may not be a convincing crew boss, but again, Gray knows how to direct an action sequence. There’s a baseline pleasure to watching the crew get to improbable work on stealing both the gold and the commercial jet ferrying it – daredevil pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), over-caffeinated safecracker Magnus (a delightful Billy Magnussen), hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), engineer Luc (Viveik Kalra) and disguise expert Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio). Maybe I’m primed by a door falling off a Boeing 737 mid-air recently, but the in-flight sequences once the plot is afoot – time-crunched logistics, hand-to-hand combat during turbulence, a couple plane barrel rolls – raised my blood pressure.

In other words, there’s plenty to keep many viewers watching for its 1 hour, 44-minute runtime. But given the bare characterization for everyone and the total lack of chemistry between Hart and Mbatha-Raw (despite her best efforts), not enough to elevate Lift above its many forgotten peers.

Lift is on Netflix on 12 January