There is a pattern to Netflix’s production: take an established movie genre with mass appeal (such as a classic action film, a spy film, or a hitman movie paired with spectacular car chases), package it for the computer screen which gets cheaper and cheaper, hire a well known actor with an enormous salary, distribute, and abandon. The same outcome Sweet Girl, The Adam Project, The Gray Man, as a small sample interesting in terms of phenomenon and numerically available but seldom analyzed or talked about movies in the house style (overlit, frenetic) many have watched but few remember. Novelty does not belong in such movies. (Let me be fair to Netflix. Vice versa, this plague is found in other streaming services as well who remembers Ghosted with The Apple?)
Moving on to Lift, the new Netflix’s project featuring Kevin Hart, a comedian (not many laughs seen here) and the idea of clever thieves is not original by any means. The film does not try to go above established expectations either. From the first minute, in which Kevin Hart’s character are watching a low budget shootem’up: a laundry list of characters, music video’s addictive images, a display of wealth, watered down personalities appealing to the lowest common denominator.
At any rate Lift, penned by Daniel Kunka, roped in the multiplex savvy of Director F Gary Gray, known previously for The Italian Job, Straight Out of Compton and Fast & Furious 8 and the like (such as music videos for Ice Cube’s It Was a Good Day and TLC Waterfalls). The design in Lift is simplistic to the point of being either ridiculous or laughable depending on the audience and their current state of mind. Such as: at the very beginning, an opening heist plotline in Venice themed around an NFT, and then the rest of the film’s inbuilt half jokes about how NFTs became popular and the buyout is now a brief period. But Gray understands how to stage violent set pieces and the chase between Cyrus and Interpol agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha Raw) through the canals of Venice is well executed if somewhat thrilling (I do worry about the waves and how quickly they’re going to wash away Venice).
Hart is often unlucky in his roles portraying someone who is goofy, the good honest man trying to figure things out or the sidekick (for example, in The Man from Toronto, an action film that debuted on Netflix and that I was able to watch but still needed to search online due to its low impact), in this situation, he is the head of a heist workshop, which is quite a twist since he steals exclusively from those who deserve it. It’s not a good fit for the specific kind of physical, loud style of humor that he has which invariably creeps through his attempts to be suave. Such as, ‘the rules were already broken for someone like me,’ which Hart spouts with all the straightness of a snooker cue, is delivered awkwardly as if it is meant to be a joke.
That line serves as some sort of weak flattery for the girl, with whom Cyrus had a mistrust filled, five day undercover one night stand. They’re not really necessary, however. Abby’s boss, Huxley (Sam Worthington, compellingly unhinged and skeevy), instructs her to seek peace with her art thief foe for the sake of global harmony IF Cyrus’s group doesn’t pinch $50m of bars when they’re ferried from London to Zurich, Lars Jorgenson (Jean Reno), the evil billionaire, will pay hackers to create chaos (he’s gone short on some stocks or something, Northern Irish henchmen are touched).
If this sounds like a watered down follow up of Ocean’s 11 with some inspiration from the Fast and Furious series, you would be right. Yet, Hart may not make a believable leader of the crew but once again, Gray sure knows how to shoot an action scene. Most importantly, crews getting to work on both operations is indeed and quite highly entertaining, absurd gold heist as well as the commercial jet stealing there’s daredevil pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), hyper safe cracker Magnus (a charming Billy Magnussen), hacker Mi Sun (Yun Jee Kim), engineer Luc (Viveik Kalra), and disguise expert Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio). Possibly because in me, a door of a Boeing 737 was sawn off over me between its flight days, the moments when the screenplay picked up especially the in essure rise.
So, in other words, it does not suffer from enough fatigue to keep more average viewers glued to the screen for its 1 hour and 44 minutes time. Though considering the minimal characterization for all and the absolute lack of a spark in Hart and Mbatha Raw’s romantic engagement (despite all the attempts), not quite sufficient to lift Lift above other long forgotten slang.
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