Lift (2024) – Drop It

Released: 12th January
Seen: 15th January

It’s become something of a joke lately that Netflix keeps producing so many films that they can’t even properly advertise them all, but it’s also probably for the best that they don’t because a lot of them are strangely forgettable garbage that’s just kind of created so that Netflix has a library of films that will never be taken away from them. What’s weird about this is that Netflix spends an absolutely jaw-dropping amount on films that, at best, will spend an eternity sitting in their digital library where they aren’t really designed to turn a profit. These are blockbusters that are made without the intention of getting blockbuster profits, a strange phenomenon that would maybe be OK if it led to fun enjoyable films… but it doesn’t, it leads to content like Lift. 

Lift is a standard issue heist movie where a bunch of criminals, led by the “charismatic” Cyrus (Kevin Hart) are tasked by Interpol agent, and also Cyrus’ former girlfriend, Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to help them thwart the plans of a terrorist named Jorgenson (Jean Reno) who plans on doing some terrorism to help him manipulate the stock market so he can make money. Long and very stupid story short, this required Cyrus and his ragtag team of criminals to steal a bunch of gold bars while mid-air in a passenger plane. This heist will involve a second plane decked out in all the most high-end gear imaginable, a mid-flight battle with a bunch of criminals and absolutely no personality whatsoever.

Lift is a film that feels like it’s trying to be hip at every step of the way, desperately throwing out things that it thinks will make it cool with the kids of today. From its reliance on NFTs as a major plot function to using several songs that were only made popular because of TikTok a year ago, it gives off the air of desperation in trying to appeal to a coveted demographic. Sadly, the things it’s using to try and get to that demographic have been out of style for long enough that now it feels dated and obvious, you can tell what they’re doing and it feels pathetic. It’s like the film admits that it’s relying on a brief moment of relevancy instead of actually being good, it’s just a shame that it got released AFTER that moment of potential relevance passed by.

Without that moment of relevancy (that Lift missed by releasing 6 months late), the film just doesn’t have anything to offer. Its script is about as basic as you can get, which is wild to say about a film involving a heist on a plane. It’s on a plane because someone pulled the word “Plane” out of a hat, it doesn’t use that setting in any interesting way. You could’ve set this entire film on a plane, train or automobile and nothing of substance would change. Why would it need to? Making this feel like a film that needed to be set on a plane would imply the film had a personality of some kind and it doesn’t have that. It’s so watered down in terms of what’s in the actual film that you would be forgiven for thinking it was just done to advertise the features of some cool new aircraft, it feels that useless.

Speaking of lacking personality, it’s wild how little this cast gets to really do. Kevin Hart is normally good for a few laughs but here it feels like he’s trying to be a serious action hero which is the literal last thing that you hire Kevin Hart to do. Almost everyone else that makes up the main criminal gang in the film is so forgettable that they can literally have someone just decide to not get on the plane during the actual heist sequence and it changes nothing about the core dynamic. They can have an absolutely brilliant actor like Vincent D’Onofrio as one of the central figures and he does nothing of substance for the 3-4 scenes he’s on screen. The only cast member that gave anything fun was Billy Magnussen as the safecracker Magnus and that’s because he’s basically doing his human Golden Retriever character that has made that actor kind of enjoyable to watch whenever he pops up, but it’s not because he had an actual character to work with. No one does, not even the villain who we have to assume is evil because he’s played by Jean Reno

Lift does try to inject some kind of personality and life into the proceedings through the cinematography, everything shown is about as hyper-stylized as you could get but all that ends up doing is making it even more obvious how bland everything else is. You can do the most elaborate revolving drone shot of paint drying, it’s still a shot of paint drying which would be more interesting than what goes on during Lift. It was around the time the camera decided to zoom inside a gun barrel and show the bullet inside superheating before it fired out, where it was obvious they were trying desperately to give this film some kind of life in the edit because they knew it didn’t have one because of the actual story being told. It’s the cinematic version of jingling keys in front of a toddler, hoping that maybe the quick motion will distract from the lack of anything actually interesting.

The annoying thing is that it’s not like this film needed to try that hard, it’s a silly little action-heist movie with a cast of criminals… it’s Oceans 11 but in the sky, this shouldn’t be hard to make work but it really just doesn’t. There’s no charm, no joy to be found here. The heist should be a lot of fun but it’s really not, half of it ends up happening just off-screen while we have to deal with the uninteresting relationship drama between Cyrus and Abby. They spent about 100 million dollars to put two people in first class on a plane to talk into earpieces before a bland fight scene began. What should’ve been an enjoyable romp becomes background noise, it’s kind of sad really.

You know what recent film did basically the same thing Lift is trying to do except did it better? Bullet Train, that film was also about a heist taking place on a fast-moving vehicle that couldn’t stop but it understood that you needed to fill the cast with interesting and fun characters. The characters are what makes this kind of film work, random extreme personalities bouncing off each other gives you a reason to sit there while people do crimes for entertainment. No one ever watched one of these films and said “Look, the characters sucked but the actual theft itself was so cool that I had fun”, No, you have to have good and interesting characters because that’s what matters and Lift wouldn’t know what one of those was if its life depended on it.

Lift is the definition of “Content”, it’s a film that exists to take up space on an online shelf so that it doesn’t look too empty when another company decides to make its own streaming service and pulls a few more films out of Netflix. It’s not a film made to be enjoyed, it’s a film made to fill quota. If the people making this film actually thought they were making something fun then I feel bad for them because something got lost between that intent and what was presented to audiences. Lift is just utterly dull, and it hurts more knowing that it absolutely could’ve and should’ve been something fun.