Lift

Lift Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Vincent D’Onofrio, Úrsula Corberó, Billy Magnussen, Viveik Kalra, Yun Jee Kim

Director: F. Gary Gray

What’s Good: Not trying too hard to release this in theatres and giving us the option to skip it midway…

What’s Bad: …though I couldn’t skip the film midway because of the review, but you can

Loo Break: You don’t even have to pause the film; in fact, watch it for ten minutes and go on a break for 1 hour 30 minutes, and by the time you are back, this will be over

Watch or Not?: Lol! Would you still ask from whatever you’ve read till now?

Language: English

Available On: Netflix

Runtime: 1 hour 44 minutes

User Rating:

The flight of this F. Gary Gray’s (The Fate of the Furious, The Italian Job) directorial takes off midway into the story when a master thief, Cyrus (Kevin Hart), alongside his team & an old flame from Interpol Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), plans a heist in a flying plane of stealing gold bars worth $500 million from the bad guy Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno).

It builds up the most basic first act to introduce Cyrus’ team, why an Interpol officer takes the help of a wanted thief to steal from the villain, and what plan they are going to execute to accomplish this heist. What’s going to happen next is what the film is all about.

Lift Movie Review: Script Analysis

Written by Daniel Kunka and directed by F. Gary Gray, everything is routine in this Kevin Hart actioner. Take something from Bond films, add a ‘family-like’ team from the Fast & Furious franchise, mix it up with an ‘Italian Job-like’ twist, and “Voila!” you have a jumbled-up mess of a film ready with zero excitement & sense of danger.

Bernhard Jasper’s (Army Of Thieves) camerawork doesn’t cross any line of experiments providing an ordinary result. Making the bad guy an ‘eco villain’ who wants to create a water shortage around the world, talking about NFTs like it’s 2022, and throwing out terms like Stewart Platform Stabilizer and PSID to sound ‘cool’ are just a few things the film uses to stand out from rest of the heist films but nothing helps it.

Lift Movie Review: Star Performance

I had some expectations from this only for the combo of Kevin Hart & F. Gary Gray, but both of them are at their laziest best to make this film any good. If you’ve Hart in your movie and you’re trying to mold him like a Bond or a Bourne, why did you even cast him in the first place? Go, get some Sam Heughan or Aidan Turner to do that. Hart’s criminally under-utilized, majorly due to his weak character sketch.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Doctor Who, Loki) gets a role that any other actress in the whole damn Hollywood could’ve done. In fact, she shouldn’t have even said yes in the first place. She plays an old flame to Kevin Hart and keeps talking about their ‘history’ without letting us actually feel the emotions & all of this doesn’t connect till the end. The rest of the team members aren’t worth even writing about because of how badly they were written.