‘Lift’ Netflix Movie Review: F Gary Gray Knows Exactly What Movie He’s Making, and Makes an Enjoyable Experience Out of an Abysmal Screenplay
LIFT. (L to R) Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Abby and Kevin Hart as Cyrus in Lift, coming to Netflix. Cr. Christopher Barr/Netflix © 2023
If there was ever any doubt of how good of a director F Gary Gray can actually be, Lift will certainly clear it up. Not because the movie is particularly great, or even good for that matter, but because the gap between the (razor-thin) quality of the script and the entertainment value of the movie is rarely this wide. Even for a film that is so adamant about understanding that it’s essentially a new Fast & Furious movie from a director who was denied the chance to return to the franchise after The Fate of the Furious, it’s annoying how much the writing feels like a first draft from an idea by an 11-year-old. And yet, I ate the whole thing up during its 90-minute runtime.
The Fast & Furious comparisons are pretty obvious all throughout, even if Lift doesn’t make any attempts at using cars in every other scene. However, none of them is more obvious than having a crew led by the most unlikeable and uninteresting character of all. They are tasked with performing a highly complicated heist with impossible-to-understand stakes should it go wrong (something about water?), and with a police officer who will soon start to question her allegiances once she sees how much it is to be a bad guy from the inside. Does that sound familiar?
Kevin Hart stars as Cyrus Whitaker, leader of a not-that-dangerous group of criminals who have been stealing art and profiting from it through laughably bad ways — seriously, at points this movie seems like a parody of the genre it so shamelessly embraces in the next scene. Lift dated itself up right off the bat, when they decided to have the opening heist sequence center around an NFT. You probably remember NFTs, those money scams that lasted six months on the Internet until everyone realized it never made any sense and was likely part of a pyramid scheme, right?
LIFT (L to R) Kevin Hart as Cyrus, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Abby and Billy Magnussen as Magnus in Lift, coming to Netflix. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
They are caught by Agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Interpol, who offers them a chance to forget about it all. They must help her prevent bad guys from carrying gold from London to Zurich aboard a commercial plane since the consequences could be catastrophic should the transaction that the gold is meant for be carried out. The crew is made up of several people who are really committed to one job, like Camila (Úrsula Corberó), the pilot, or Magnus (Billy Magnussen), the safecracker. They all gravitate around Cyrus, who isn’t really great at anything but is seen as the leader because… I guess he put leadership skills on his resumé? And he has a short history with the girl?
It’s hard for Lift to get over the fact that Hart was clearly miscast in the role. He’s proven himself to be a great supporting actor, but when it comes to leading a film, he’s yet to prove that his shtick can actually land. In this specific case, Cyrus should have been taken slightly more seriously — not Dom Toretto-serious, though. And that’s too bad, because all of his supporting players perfectly understood the assignment, with Mbatha-Raw carrying the film for Hart when he stumbles, and Vincent D’Onofrio as the shapeshifter Denton having the time of his life. Corberó also really shined in the role, with her part becoming really significant in the third act.
LIFT. (L to R) Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Abby and Stefano Stalkotos as Stefano in Lift, coming to Netflix.. Cr. Stefano Cristiano Montesi/Netflix © 2023
Cyrus’ big idea for the job is not to lift the gold but to lift the plane. It’s now a big-scale heist that involves two planes, plenty of people (some new to the crew, even), and some awkwardly directed fistfights. Gary Gray’s eye for action comes to shine in the third act, with a few particularly inventive sequences (that were clear references to stuff in recent cinema history, yet feel enough like their own thing). However, the hand-to-hand combat is not his greatest strength — though, apparently, Kevin Hart’s character is actually pretty good at it, even though the little backstory we’re given to him shows he should be knocked down immediately (?). Again, this is one of the year’s first examples of pure stupid fun, and at least I hope Netflix can learn something from it. If nothing else, at least cinematographer Bernhard Jasper was smart enough to show us pretty colors to keep our attention — something a movie like Heart of Stone and its gray-based color palette could have used.
As you can imagine going in, there aren’t a lot of surprises in the narrative, but there’s also a nice thing about a movie that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to surprise the audience with something it can’t be. This is no Vin Diesel saying Furious 7 will get nominated for Best Picture; this is a group of actors having fun and saying stupid lines that shouldn’t fly under any script supervisor. Lift is the perfect watch for a Saturday afternoon to fall asleep to for 30 minutes and realize, when you wake up, that you can still follow exactly what is going on because everything is panning out as you thought it would. It is the pure definition of entertainment, and can we blame it for that?
Lift will stream on Netflix on January 12.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
