Kevin Hart doesn’t even get to be Kevin Hart in Netflix’s new Kevin Hart movie
Lift, the new Netflix action caper starring Kevin Hart, is a roguish, high-tech heist movie about an unlikely band of desperadoes using their thieving skills to save the world. Its makers, led by director F. Gary Gray and Hart as a producer, are clearly trying to triangulate a spot somewhere between the Ocean’s movies, the Fast and Furious franchise, and Mission: Impossible. It’s tempting to say it gets about as close to those as a Hallmark movie does to a classic Meg Ryan romantic comedy, but that would be unfair to Hallmark movies. Hallmark movies have their own vibe, a soothing blandness that’s at least partially the point. Lift, like so much of Netflix’s action output, is a characterless, garish simulacrum that isn’t satisfying on any level.
It isn’t fooling anyone, however. You only need to see a single frame of Lift, taken past the 10-minute mark, to know something’s wrong. During those first 10 minutes, we’re introduced to Cyrus Whitaker (Hart) and his crew of international art thieves: master of disguise Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen), engineer Luc (Viveik Kalra), and hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim). We watch them undertake a daring art heist at a simultaneous auction in Venice and London, right under the nose of Interpol agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). The heist is passably entertaining and there’s an actual speedboat chase, filmed on location in Venice.
Then, abruptly, the film lurches into a tacky unreality it inhabits for the rest of its 104-minute run time. The crew make their escape and arrive on a super-yacht that’s poorly rendered CGI without, and brightly lit soundstage within. There, they sit around and explain how they pulled off the
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