Kevin Hart doesn’t even get to be Kevin Hart in Netflix’s new Kevin Hart movie

12.01.2024 - 19:01 / polygon.com / Kevin Hart

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 world’s first theft of priceless NFT art, an already unfashionable concept which precisely carbon-dates Daniel Kunka’s screenplay to 2020-2021. The rest of the movie is shot almost entirely on soundstages, and has the flat lighting, glassy photography, and flimsy FX that are the sad trademarks of most Netflix Original movies. Nothing about it looks real.

That’s a bad start for a supposedly globe-trotting adventure. The action moves to fake London: Mbatha-Raw’s Abby manages to pin the Venice heist on Denton, which she then uses to blackmail Cyrus’ crew into pulling a job for the good guys, at the behest of anti-terror agent Huxley (Sam Worthington). They need to find a way to steal half a billion dollars of gold belonging to billionaire baddy Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno) to stop him from funding a global terror campaign that he will use to short the markets.

Cyrus concludes that the only way to do this is while the gold is being transported (by passenger aircraft, for some reason)