Heist in the air, in the water and on the ground - review of the action movie "LIFT"
Another robbery from the director of "Italian Job", unfortunately, turned out to be a fall from a height.
Cyrus (Kevin Hart) and his brave team can easily steal Van Gogh's works and then rise at auction. After all, art is known to make a sensation. But the criminals are being watched by Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Embata-Raw), who puts Cyrus' team in front of a choice: either go to jail or help the international police to disrupt the plans of a millionaire terrorist (Jean Reno). For some sinister purpose, he's decided to ship gold bars by airplane - and the team must figure out how to steal them.
A clever heist in a movie is akin to a performance - it has a good claim to the status of a phenomenon in contemporary art. And vice versa: the works of art themselves, no secret to anyone, acquire such a valuable aura when they are robbed - the fateful incident of 1911, when the "Gioconda" was taken out of the Louvre and, it seems, immortalized forever, will not lie. About the art of cinema do not stutter, but director Felix Gary Gray knows a lot about thievery adventures. In "The Italian Heist" he showed a cunning criminal stratagem, where the robbers, knowing exactly where to measure and cut off, used a targeted explosion to lower the safe with gold underwater. Twenty years later, a lot of things have changed - robbing banks, for example, has become almost impossible (thanks to digitalization), and even more so a valuable museum piece. How, you might ask, can you steal artifacts if they are sold on the NFT and the auctions themselves are turning into virtual marketplaces? It's a wonderful new world.
In "LIFT" Grey tries to answer the challenges of the time by developing another cunning plan of robbery, this time thousands of meters above the ground. Such stratagem as never before corresponds to some "Fast and Furious", and here it's time to remind that Gray just directed the eighth part, where there was not unknown scene with a submarine. Only in the new action, unfortunately, the game is not worth the candle at all - "LIFT" is almost entirely made of the most flimsy composites. With a fatal repetitiveness studio money of such a giant as "action movie from Netflix", sucks somewhere in the airplane engine.
For the entire hour and a half, the audience is teased: "If we don't do this, we'll go to jail" - "Let's show them what true art looks like". The trouble is that the kidnapping characters don't know how to sell themselves to the audience - all are completely devoid of individuality. The problem applies to the movie as a whole - it doesn't know which side to turn to the showcase, offering a comedy (spineless and cheesy), an adventurous action (cheap and sloppy), or a streaming version of "Ocean's Friends" (but for the Zoomers). The movie lacks lightness in flight, the plot is carried along turbulent zones: the villain Jean Reno remains without motivation, the romantic duo of Kevin Hart and Gugu Embata-Raw - with a characteristic lusciousness, reducing the teeth, the procedure of the robbery is staged mediocre - it is not only deprived of interesting details and suspense, but also at all taken out of the frame. Not to mention the aerial acrobatics with a pig of bad CGI - you won't see any cool challenges for the vestibular apparatus.
Yes, today there is a desperate lack of movies in the old airplane action movie genre in the manner of "Con Air" and "Passenger 57". By most accounts, that genre dissolved somewhere in the '90s. But Gray's "LIFT" is one of those cases where taking aviation to the skies was clearly not worth it.
This article was sponosred by Angela Baran
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