Lift is an attempt at the heist movie using all the tricks and techniques you’ve seen in several outstanding heist movies before. Lift doesn’t come up to that high quality standard, but it has an interesting cast including Gugu Mbatha-Raw. It’s good enough for a night on the couch with a bag of chips if you don’t expect too much from it.
A crew of master thieves is headed by Cyrus (Kevin Hart). From left to right above you also see Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), Camila (Úrsula Corberó), Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), Luke (Viveik Kalra), and Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
Wait! Interpol agent?
Oh, right. Interpol was trying to catch a crook named Jorgensen (Jean Reno). He planned to fly $30 billion in gold bars into his private airport. Interpol wanted Cyrus and his team to steal the gold for them. They sent Abby to ask Cyrus to help because Abby and Cyrus had a thing going a while back for 5 days – not a week, 5 days!
That’s the set up. The heist takes place while flying at 40,000 feet. There are stealth planes and fights while flying upside down or in free fall. There’s gold everywhere. A fun time was had by all. Except the bad guys, of course.
Lift really tried. It just wasn’t as good as it wanted to be. You can see it on Netflix.
Does it feel to you like we’ve been flooded with a rash of not-very-good films and series since the actors and writers strike stopped everything for a while? Streamers, especially Netflix, are rushing to get any kind of content out no matter the quality. I’d like to be writing about something great, like Barbie, instead of writing reviews of movies that aren’t very good.