Review | Netflix movie review: Lift – Kevin Hart plays an art thief in heist comedy that squanders its promising cast with a lifeless story

Netflix delivers another underwhelming action movie that’s short on thrills and laughs. Kevin Hart is woefully miscast and his co-stars go through the motions

A globe-trotting thriller centred on a daring mid-air gold heist, Lift barely takes off; the script is dull, the action slapdash, the 5-star locations wasted

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Kevin Hart as Cyrus in a still from “Lift”, a heist comedy on Netflix in which he is woefully miscast and some of his co-stars just going through the motions. They are not helped by a lifeless script, and what action there is is slapdash and over-reliant on CGI. Photo: Christopher Barr/Netflix

Published: 10:01am, 12 Jan 2024

1/5 stars

Looking to start 2024 with a bang, Netflix recruits superstar funnyman Kevin Hart to play a notorious art thief in the action-packed heist comedy Lift.

Under the direction of F. Gary Gray (The Fate of the Furious), and boasting an ensemble cast that includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jean Reno, and Vincent D’Onofrio, this globe-trotting thriller about a daring mid-air gold heist should have been a slam dunk.

And yet, following disappointments such as Red Notice and Heart of Stone, the streaming giant delivers yet another flaccid, underwhelming action dud, overly reliant on familiar faces and recognisable locales to hold our attention, instead of genuine laughs and thrills.

The action opens in Venice, where the Robin Hood-esque Cyrus Whitaker (Hart) and his team snatch a multimillion-dollar NFT – an objet d’art as ephemeral and passé as the film itself – while simultaneously lifting a priceless Van Gogh from a gallery in London, all under the noses of Interpol.