The latest Kevin Hart movie has arrived on Netflix and to my surprise, it isn’t a comedy. Well, it isn’t ENTIRELY a comedy. It sure is labeled one but if I had 100 bucks for every time I laughed, I’d be flat broke. Lift is an action “comedy” that tells the story of a group of professional criminals who, After outsmarting Interpol, decide to steal a safe full of gold in the hardest way possible: off of a plane in flight. While trying to avoid the same agent from Interpol they tricked last time, they obviously run into some complications along the way.
There are numerous renowned actors in this film. Kevin Hart obviously plays the lead role with support from Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Úrsula Corberó, Sam Worthington, Billy Magnussen, Vincent D’Onofrio and many more. A pretty decent cast for a sub par movie.
It was very unsettling to see Kevin Hart star in a movie where he isn’t making jokes every other line but also didn’t do a terrible job at his serious side.I wasn’t sure if the producers were aiming for a more comical action film but if they were, they severely failed at it. The only character that I would say that had any kind of comic relief was Magnus, played by Billy Magnussen. I quite enjoyed his character and the way he portrayed him. He played the quirky safecracker and actually brought a decent performance to the film, an area where it was severely lacking.
For being an action-heist film, the choreography and visuals were not great. Some of the fight scenes were flat-out boring and had me yawning and staring at my watch to see when it would end.
Like stated in the title, this movie seemed awfully similar to Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious franchise. In that film, the crew stole a safe full of money and basically dragged it across the country. Lift seems to copy that idea. The entire plot to this snoozefest was that Kevin Hart and Co. wanted to steal an impenetrable safe full of gold, but instead of using cars to do it (like in Fast Five) they build their own plane and try to steal it off of another plane while in flight.
Don’t ask me how it’s possible, I have no idea.
Maybe they were trying something new while copying another movie, but it clearly doesn’t work as seen on Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd.
Final Thoughts:
Besides a couple notable performances and meh action sequences, Lift shows that Kevin Hart can’t really make non-comedies with a rating above a two star and having more positive reviews than negatives. In my humble opinion, he should just continue with creating laughable films or just stop with the filmmaking period.
