‘Lift’ Review: Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw Team Up in F. Gary Gray’s Clunky Heist Flick

The first target is an art auction in Venice. Led by their aspirationally stoic chief, Cyrus (Kevin Hart), the crew at the center of Netflix’s distrusting heist film Lift prepare to steal fine works from the clutches of the one percent. This squad — an efficient group of tech geniuses and masters of disguise — see themselves as cultural Robin Hoods. They take from the rich to line their pockets, screw the wealthy and help the artists. 

At the beginning of the film, directed by F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton), Cyrus waltzes toward a building of imposing beauty, where the auction is to be held. A red carpet outlines a path to the front door, and on either side of the ropes Venetians mill about in masks. Venice, which Gray captured more delicately in his 2003 The Italian Job, looks garish in this opening sequence. Light touches every surface, as if the exposure has been turned all the way up.

This brightness doesn’t seem to bother Cyrus, who saunters to his assigned seat while checking in on his team via mic. When the auction begins, he bids millions on an NFT by the anonymous artist N8 (Jacob Batalon). There’s still promise at this point in Lift as we build an understanding of the dynamics at play. Watching Cyrus, Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), Camila (Úrsula Corberó), Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim) and Luke (Viveik Kalra) work the room and the area surrounding the auction house is Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). She’s an overachieving federal agent who leads a group dedicated to tracking and arresting Cyrus and his bandits. 

Once the action gets underway, so too do these early signs of promise. Lift doesn’t seem to trust viewers enough to withhold details. It’s too insecure, too eager, too anxious to be mysterious. Its tricks are not so much revealed as word-vomited through clunky exposition. When Cyrus and his team nab the NFT, they also kidnap the artist. The abduction — hardly as menacing as it sounds — creates an international uproar. 

Here lies an opportunity to comment on a visual art world sustained by hype, and to create intrigue around a group that plays into it because stolen goods, in their experience, bestow a rarefied status. Instead, Lift constructs this moment so Cyrus can walk N8 through each step of their heist and explain the group’s mission. There’s no need to hypothesize on motivations, individual or collective, in Lift. Cyrus will explain it sooner or later. That deflating realization forced this critic to rewatch a classic (Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake) to remind herself that yes, this genre could be fun.

The staged capture of N8 leads into the real drama of Lift. After a conversation with her colleague Huxley (Sam Worthington), the director of a more “serious” Interpol department, Abby is forced to recruit Cyrus’ crew. Huxley has his sights on a bigger target: Jorgenson (Jean Reno), a billionaire who profits off of manufactured destruction. He’s recently cut a deal with an anonymous hacker group to tap into the grids over the world and cause mass flooding. More exposition clues audiences in on the plan: Abby must get Cyrus and company to steal millions of dollars of gold from a flight without Jorgenson finding out. 

If you’re still on board at this point in the film (this is all within the first 20 minutes) then you’ll also find out that Abby and Cyrus have history, which complicates their current relationship. It should also add tension to the dynamic, but that’s virtually undetectable. For all their respective talents, Hart and Mbatha-Raw are mismatched, and Daniel Kunka’s screenplay doesn’t give their connection enough time to gestate. Abby and Cyrus’ romance lives in expository recollections of their childhoods and a whirlwind week together.

There’s also an unnecessary formality to Hart’s representation of an internationally wanted man. The actor has been leaning into more dramatic roles recently, but his performance here is dogged by a studied smoothness that strips his character of a required natural playfulness. (Compare this to his portrayal of a single dad in Fatherhood, which found him using his comedic roots to ground the performance.)

Cyrus agrees to help Interpol in exchange for immunity, and the crew sets off to work on their biggest heist yet. As with all great heists, there is a level of impossibility and a risk to their lives. Motivated by a surveillance-free future, Cyrus and his fellow thieves formulate a plan to retrieve the gold from the plane, offer Jorgenson up to the authorities and save lives.

The rush of scheming gives Lift a necessary injection of thrills. Even if the technology veers toward the unrealistic, Gray is a skilled enough director that these scenes of tech acquisition and tricky execution add a minor sense of urgency to the proceedings. It’s not enough to save Lift, but it does make the film feel a little less ridiculous.