Netflix’s New Heist Movie Lift Wastes a Fun Cast

The secret to making a good heist movie isn’t really the heist itself but the chemistry among the actors. While the mechanics of breaking into this or that vault or stealing this or that precious object can be pleasurable, if it’s not being done by people we sort of care about, then it’s useless. Do you remember the actual heists from any of the Ocean’s movies? More than likely you remember the actors and their sparkling repartee. Inception has a terrifically nutty scheme involving dream invaders, but it ultimately works because of its tortured protagonist and his elaborate attempt to repair his mark’s relationship with his dead father. Heat has one of the great bank-robbery shoot-outs, but it would completely fall flat without that mesmerizing, melancholy cast of characters. I don’t even remember what the hell they were trying to steal in The Thomas Crown Affair, but I do remember Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.

So the best thing to say about the new Netflix heist movie Lift is that it’s cast pretty well. Kevin Hart actually plays the straight man in this one, as notorious con artist and thief Cyrus Whitaker, whom we first see bidding up the auction price of a newfangled piece of NFT art before causing a commotion during which he briefly kidnaps the work’s mysterious, Banksy-like artist (a clever ploy to run up the value of the NFT he just bought). Cyrus is surrounded by a likable cast of accomplices, including Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), a somewhat hapless master of disguise a bit too in love with his abilities; Camila (Úrsula Corberó), a spunky getaway driver and pilot; Magnus (Billy Magnussen), an adrenaline-junkie safecracker; and Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), a hacker.

Then there’s Interpol Cultural Heritage Unit agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who once had a brief fling with Cyrus, and for whom he still has feelings. She wants to take him down, but after that opening art heist, she enlists his aid in trying to stop murderous tycoon Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno) from transporting a ten-ton block of half a billion dollars in gold from his vault in London to his lair in Switzerland, where he plans to pay off a group of international hackers to set off a series of terror strikes around the world, from which he will then profit.

This setup is, of course, needlessly convoluted, and the heist itself even more so, involving commandeering a high-tech experimental jet from an overhyped international playboy (played by Oli Green, this character is presented in such a way as to suggest we’re supposed to know who he is — I, for one, did not), then building some other high-tech doodad to help defeat the other high-tech doodad that Jorgensen uses to guard his gold … which he’s somehow transporting on a high-tech passenger jet? Technology in movies can be fun, but not when it’s used as a crutch to make up for a script’s lack of invention. The one saving grace of the many shenanigans in Lift is that everything is so confusing that we don’t get the chance to realize how punishingly implausible it all is.

Luckily, there are some nice character moments, as when Denton gently mocks Cyrus for the puppy-dog face he makes whenever he looks at Abby, or Camila’s sheer terror at what she’s gotten into mid-heist as she races a stealth-panel-covered jet beneath an enormous passenger airliner, or Magnus’s desperate attempt to flee a gun-toting baddie that ends with someone losing a few fingers. One wishes the film had spent less time on its dumb heists and more time bouncing these people off one another. There are bits and pieces of Lift strewn throughout that hint at the better movie it could have been with some inspiration and discipline.

Director F. Gary Gray is a veteran Hollywood journeyman who made Friday, Set It Off, and The Negotiator back in the day, and who knows his way around a slick set piece. (He also made The Fate of the Furious, one of the more dire Fast and Furious entries, but let’s not hold that one against him.) He’s working with Netflix money here, so he hovers around the fancy locales, sending drones flying above the Swiss Alps and London and pointing bird’s-eye-view cameras down on palazzos in Venice. The wealth porn on display can be fabulous, with rooftop infinity pools and huge castles and private airfields and enormous first-class airplane cabins. It’s all empty calories, but it certainly looks nice. In that sense, Lift is kind of the platonic ideal of a streaming flick: some eye candy, a few funny lines, and a plot that no sane person could possibly waste any time worrying about.