Rating: Half-Full

Genre: Heist, Comedy, Thriller, Action, Adventure

Studios: Netflix/Harbeat/Kinberg Genre Films/6th & Idaho Motion Picture Company

Cast: Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ursula Corbero, Billy Magnussen, Jacob Batalon, Jean Reno and Sam Worthington

Director: F. Gary Gray

Writer: Daniel Kunka

Producers: Audrey Chon, Kevin Hart, Adam Kassan, Simon Kinberg, Matt Reeves and Brian Smiley

Music by: Dominic Lewis and Guillaume Roussel

Rated: PG-13 for violence and action, suggestive material and some language

Release Date: 01/12/24

Runtime: 1h 47m

Tagline: The heist begins at 40,000 ft

Favorite Character: The Jet

Quote: “God, I really love that NFT.”- Cyrus

Fun Fact: The large painting in one of the scenes is a same painting that was stolen from a museum in Boston in 1990.

The Review: Prepare for takeoff! with your favorite comedian Kevin Hart on board, but does Lift make a good in-flight movie? I’m not sure.

Now let us meet the team! Your main thief, Cyrus (Kevin Hart), Pilot Camila (Ursula Corbero), Safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Korean hacker Mi-Sun (Kim Yoon-Ji), engineering expert Luke (Viveik Kalra) and the master of disguise Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio) and of course, like some of the other heist movies, they are criminals. It’s good to have a team, but perhaps giving them more characteristics would make the characters more

The opening was pretty eye catching to me, but mostly from the golden mask worn by an NFT artist that goes by N8, who rather remains anonymous, just like musicians Daft Punk, Deadmau5 and Marshmello. What is NFT? It is a Non Fundable Token which people sold for thousands or millions, yeah, i don’t understand all that stuff, but that’s what Cyrus and his team are stealing in the opening. Spider-Man fans will flip when N8 was forced to remove his mask, revealing it to be Jacob Batalon! Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but I think this is probably the first heist movie where the team steals an NFT.

Shortly after the NFT heist, the criminals are caught by Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who is willing to give them a second chance providing that they, big surprise, pull a huge heist. Stealing the bar of gold, in the plane, while 40,000 ft in the air! Now if you are confused, there is a billionaire (Jean Reno) in Zurich working with the cyber terrorists that are plotting to flood cities, so in other words, that greedy man is willing to make a profit at the cost of a lot of lives. I actually believe that sounds like what real life greedy people would do in real life, so I give this villain written by screen writer Danial Kunka a credit.

The coolest character in the movie would probably be…a high tech private jet. Yes, a high tech jet. It can spell out messages on the bottom, has a cool design inside (with a stripper pole) and for most of the time, covered in steel plates to avoid detection while going under the commercial airliner that contains gold! While it does sound like a crazy plan, it wasn’t even that unique. In fact, it may actually have been done in multiple films like Lift.

Now I do appreciate F. Gary Gray for trying his best to pull off this heist thriller and i don’t see how this movie lacks excitement, but with so many cliches in the film and the fact that I barely even notice that it was comedy, Lift went in the rough landing but if you want a simple thriller, this probably will do.