Hello, I’m Fred D, Schenectady high’s best film reviewer. I’m very excited to start my long journey of watching as many 2024 movies as I can. So I decided to start with an amazing choice. No, not a depressing indie film or an amazing blockbuster. I picked a basic Netflix action movie. I can already feel the excitement you’re feeling after that description. Lift came out on January 12th 2024 and skyrocketed to the number one slot on Netflix’s most popular movies right now. Lift’s about a group of art thieves who are hired by the government to steal a bunch of gold from an evil banker. It stars Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki) and Vincent D’Onofrio (Daredevil). I already had iffy expectations starting to watch Lift, but did it pass my already low expectations? Ehhhhhhh. 

While Lift has a multitude of problems the main issue are the characters. I feel like someone took a straw and sucked the charisma out of Kevin Hart before they started filming. He was just boring, his attempt to be a suave lead only resulted in an uninteresting main character. The heist crew are a bunch of cardboard cut-outs of basic heist movie characters.  One character had the same energy Ezra Miller did in The Flash, which is anything but a compliment. I did like the weird tech billionaire played by Oli Green, although just seeing any interesting character is surprising in this. The villain was basic, the romance was basic, the side characters were basic. Maybe this movie was just basic. 

Lift did not just mess up the characters, they also won the bad editing award too. At some transitions it looks like the title card for a morning news show. Even when they were doing their cool heist member intro the freeze frames were blurry. At one point the lighting was so bad it made Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s character look like the ghost of Christmas past. The editing and technical aspects were all over the place and made this already bad movie even worse. 

I guess I’ll talk about the story, even though the story seemed like an afterthought. The relationship is forced, and the conflict is so hamstrung and added in just to make it a little more interesting. It’s your basic heist plot done at its worst. If you want an interesting and fun action movie on Netflix just watch Bullet Train. You won’t feel like you wasted an hour and forty minutes. 

Overall Lift is a tired attempt at a heist movie. It’s Netflix trying to bring to life a bad script with a bunch of known actors just to get buzz. I saw how popular it was on Netflix and all I felt was shame that it was that popular, but then I remembered I watched it. So am I part of the problem? It’s always annoying to see a boring forced movie making millions. If you’re like me and watch bad schlock, remember to watch at least one indie movie afterwards to balance it out. Or go watch Bullet Train after this, either way you’ll have a much better time than you did with Lift. 

Score: 4/10 (don’t recommend)