The Stream: Predictable and Unoriginal

The Big Screen: Filmed nicely?

The Final Bill: The typical ensemble cast heist movie with no pizazz

– S2S: Movie Review
Director: F. Gary Gray
Writers: Daniel Kunka
Stars: Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sam Worthington
Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime
Rating: PG-13 (a little adult language and violence)
Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes
Production Companies: 6th & Idaho Productions, Genre Films, Genre Pictures, Hartbeat Productions, Marzano Films
Platform: Netflix released January 12, 2024
Coming Soon To Netflix: Orion and the Dark, Players, Mea Culpa, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Code 8: Part II

Happy New Year, Streamers, and welcome to MLK Holiday weekend. This weekend Netflix released their latest Hartbeat film, Lift. This movie follows Kevin Hart as a master thief whose his crew becomes intertwined with Interpol and an Agent in order to save lives in their latest heist. The team must steal $500 million in gold transported on an A380 passenger flight to help Interpol protect Europe. Allegedly, comedic heist hijinks ensue.

If you can’t tell by the preview, this movie is almost without a pulse. Kevin Hart literally said, “I need to produce and star in a heist movie like this. No way this will go wrong!” And he was unfortunately wrong about that. The movie is not totally bad, but the movie is one of the most boring, predictable and uncharismatic versions of this genre of movie. Everything that happens in every other movie happens in this, but it’s more drawn out. The movie lacks any surprise or creativity. There’s no spin on style, form, character tropes, or twists. It’s literally a carbon copy to a few movies out there. And you know what, that’s what makes it perfect for straight to streaming. It also makes it perfect to skip for a while. Hart finds himself trying to be Danny Ocean but doesn’t pull off the charm and lacks the humor that he’s known for. The rest of the cast is okay. Two standouts make the movie comedically bearable in their limited exposure, Billy Magnussen and David Proud. Outside of those two, everyone else is extra regular and boring. I mean it’s so regular that it hard to describe in any other way imaginatively.

Clearly, Lift is just a movie. You know what you’re going to get from this type of film and you don’t even need to question it or think. The bad part about this lack of creativity is that you also won’t find yourself chuckling much at this movie either. Lift is no more than a handful of popcorn on its best day.