‘Lift’ Review
There are few genres of film that I find as satisfying when they meet the bare minimum of expectations than the heist genre. All you need is an eclectic cast of characters, each serving their unique role in a high-stakes operation where the ability to improvise becomes crucial as the many moving parts begin coming together - or falling apart. It’s why a film like Lift isn’t a complete misfire: it at least crafts an interesting enough heist to execute and understands that it’s the centerpiece for the film, more so than its ensemble who feels like a grab-bag of actors forced into a marketing stunt to turn its star, Kevin Hart, into more than just a comedic actor. While F. Gary Gray’s latest maintains a slick execution of its hook, Lift can’t help feeling like the product of an assembly line built around a single inspired idea, but in a genre where it’s hard to distance the film from its contemporaries.
Gray’s no stranger to the heist film, either, and he’s no slouch in that department. His previous films, like 1996’s Set It Off and 2003’s The Italian Job come to mind, but throughout Lift it felt most closely aligned with The Fast and the Furious franchise, where Gray directed the eighth entry: The Fate of the Furious. However, where that franchise took its time turning a group of criminals into government agents for hire, Daniel Kunka’s screenplay haphazardly throws together justification for its alliances in order to keep the plot moving forward. Despite this, the most surprising element of Lift is that it does generally work in the one area that it needs to: the heist is fun.
After Cyrus (Hart) and his crew pull off the first-ever heist of an NFT (non-fungible token, for those who have managed to avoid the godforsaken term this long), they are approached by his ex-girlfriend and current Interpol agent, Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), to steal a cargo load of gold from a plane being received by Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno) - one of Interpol’s most wanted criminals, who is now working alongside a cybercrime organization named Leviathan. None of the government’s reasons for wanting to have Jorgensen’s gold stolen is really relevant in the context of Lift -he’s an evil, greedy man, and while the film demonstrates the threat his alliance with Leviathan poses on the world, it’s not exactly touched on outside of providing context for why he’s a bad person.
Instead, Kunka’s screenplay focuses on the relationship between Cyrus and Abby and tries to contextualize Cyrus’ thievery as a morally righteous endeavor. As mentioned, an ensemble can do wonders for this particular genre of film, but in the case of Lift, it’s mostly Hart who is propped up by the people surrounding him. There’s a hacker (Kim Yoon-Ji), a pilot (Úrsula Corberó), a master of disguise (Vincent D’Onofrio), a safecracker (Billy Magnussen), and an engineer (Viveik Kalra). Their personality types are fairly unremarkable, and the chemistry between the actors is slight, if existent at all, sometimes. They either feel like they’re just filling a role, or in a different film altogether. That being said, the chemistry between Mbatha-Raw and Hart is surprisingly decent and when contrasted against the rest of the crew, it always feels like the film’s intention is to just eventually bring Abby into their gang.
Say what you will about the fact that Lift sounds like a marketing ploy to diversify Hart’s acting portfolio, but he manages to make a solid case for the pivot. Cyrus is a thief with a moral code, and as such, he’s given far more dramatic weight as the leader of a crew of criminals. It feels strained at times, but Hart’s performance is what films like this often crave: the actor who can be light-hearted while still making himself feel in charge of it all when needed. Watching him play a character who has responsibility for others and isn’t just having fun the whole time makes all the difference. As far as maintaining levity throughout while still holding the whole thing together, Hart doesn’t fumble the execution as much as other comedic actors might. It also plays well into the script itself which has a very fun energy to it right down to the mechanics of the heist, where Gray’s constantly operating at Jason-Statham-shooting-bad-guys-in-a-plane-while-protecting-a-baby levels of playfulness from his The Fate of the Furious days.
The element of the film most interesting to Kunka and Gray appears to be the intersection of technology with governments and criminals. From the initial NFT heist in which Cyrus and his crew orchestrate a kidnapping of an artist because they can’t physically steal an NFT, to the incorporation of drones, LED screens, and cameras to the heist’s plan and the action scenes comprised within it, Kunka’s screenplay scratches the surface of a potentially exciting addition to the genre. Unfortunately, the interest in the subject matter starts and stops there. The most involved any of it becomes is in the heist itself where there are literal parts to the plan that need to be assembled in order to make any of the high-tech components of the scheme effective. It’s a bit of a cheap way of making the heist have stages to it, but it also works a bit more cleanly than it sounds on paper.
While Lift never rises to its contemporaries in terms of fun scenes or tense situations, what’s there is serviceable and once the heist actually begins in earnest, it’s much more entertaining than you might expect given the somewhat tedious preamble that leads up to it all. It never seems to aspire to be more than that, which is a bit of a shame since there are plenty of opportunities for the film to raise the stakes, and when entertainment is its priority, it delivers just enough to keep everything moving. Unfortunately, there’s a lot to be desired in just how much it relies on hitting familiar beats versus making those beats its own. The humor is worth a chuckle at most, and the action is only really effective during the heist - which, again, is a lot of fun in the moment, but, as with most moments in Lift, it is hard to care about what is actually happening because the stakes just aren’t there.
It’s hard to disparage a film that feels like it’s not aiming to be more than an entertaining distraction, and Lift certainly fits that bill even if it also feels like it’s trying to adjust its star’s career. The problem is that when the film does try to punch above its weight, it struggles to land the blow. A globe-trotting adventure that just feels like it’s going through the motions, Lift does fly by without much fuss and slightly makes up for its shortcomings thanks to F. Gary Gray’s knack for turning a sturdy heist into something kinetic and fun.
