‘Lift Review: Kevin Harts Disappointing Heist Movie Only Steals Its Audiences Precious Time
With actor and producer Kevin Hart directing "Elevator," we know exactly what that means. Netflix's heist movie means Hart is doubling down on action comedies after "The Man From Toronto" and expanding the cast for the "True Story" sequel. But does that make “Lift” more than just another step in the Heartwarming franchise? And what does “elevator” mean for real viewers ?
Like Adam Sandler's "Murder Mystery" films of the mid-2000s, it's hard to imagine "the film" as anything other than an homage to its protagonist, who seems to share flashy, overexposed cinematography.
Hart plays crime boss Cyrus, who leads a special team of thieves to "collect" internationally famous items (every heist movie needs a team ). Case in point: The group unleashes a series of scams to exclude a digital artist named Banksy (Jacob Batalon) who won tens of millions of dollars at an auction in Venice. By holding NB and ruining the auctions, the price of NB coins will triple and everyone will become very rich. All of this is explained to Cyrus on the boat, NB nods in surprise and disbelief at Cyrus' "genius".
Oh, and the aforementioned crew is introduced with ice frames and weird titles, leading to Cyrus Magnus' (Billy Magnuson) thumbs-up and "Oh yeah, man!" Ursula Corbero plays Camilla (“The Pilot”) and Kim Yoon-Gi is “The Hacker”. Vincent D'Onofrio, in a wonderful performance from Matt's casting, is Denton, the costume master and basically the hook for most of the plot.
Everything is going well until he meets old flame Abi (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an Interpol agent. According to the show, Cyrus and Abby are *controlled to watch* (sorry, but he doesn't call them what they were) for five days to be exact, but during their short courtship, they don't know the identity of the other. Cyrus made up the story(?) he was hiding at the time and Abby immediately agreed. Their shared spark isn't worth talking about, so they must put their feelings aside and stop a big, bad international criminal (Jean Reno) from getting his hands on $500 million in gold.
Abby asks Cyrus and her team to steal a cache of gold from a commercial airliner in flight. With the half-century-old franchise "Mission: Impossible" dealing with emotional artificial intelligence, "Elevator" decided to return to the roots of the genre, with a game that is good old gold. Is this refreshing or just another example of this breathtaking “content” produced by Netflix?
However, the real crime of “Elevator” is not that it is an “Oceans” movie. No, the truth is that director F Gary Gray has made horror films in the past and "Elevator" is not one of them. This is the Oscar-nominated director of “Straight Outta Compton.” This is the director who aimed to remake the “Italian work” in America.
Heist is not only a good movie but also a 21st century movie . This is a man who could make one of the best heist films of the century. And “Elevator” feels like a genre piece in its own right, without the emptiness of “The Italian Job” or the emotional power of “Straight Outta Compton.” Who cares about collecting gold? What is really being stolen here is our time.
“Elevator” is now streaming on Netflix.
