Lift is a trifecta of bullshit. It’s as lame as you’d expect a movie that features “the world’s first heist of an NFT” to be, as underhanded and morally deficient as you’d expect a modern-day heist movie to be, and as unamusing as you’d expect a movie starring Kevin Hart to be. Additionally, it parades around such an obscene amount of unconvincing CGI that it looks as cheap, and at the same nowhere near as economical, as a SyFy original.
Most films about a quote-unquote thief with a heart of gold go to great lengths to rationalize larceny as a victimless crime (e.g., the oxymoronically titled Honest Thief); I guess they equate ‘victim’ with ‘casualty.’ Few, however, are as deep in denial as this one. If Fox Mulder believed the lie, Lift believes the euphemism.
But let’s start at the beginning. Cyrus (Hart) attends a rich-asshole auction in Venice and makes a successful $20 million bid on “a single-edition NFT” by a “digital artist” (which I’m pretty sure is a contradiction in terms) known only as N8 (Jacob Batalon), whom Cyrus then proceeds to abduct under the guise of offering him a boat ride to Cyrus’s yacht.
This all happens under the remote surveillance of interpol agent Abby Gladwell (the awesomely named Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Abby realizes that Cyrus knows she’s watching him because his paddle is “registered to John Bratby.”
Says Abby, “John Bratby, British, mid-century, painted scenes of domestic life.” Yeah, but which century? (surely not this century, since we haven’t reached the midpoint yet). Abby’s underling wonders how “that gives us away,” and Abby replies that she’s “living in his old studio” (Brantby’s, I assume, not Cyrus’s ), but the correct answer is that it doesn’t; it gives Cyrus away, so a better question would be, why would Cyrus want to tip Abby off that he’s onto her?
(And while we’re asking questions, how does an Interpol agent afford to live in a studio that used to belong to an influential artist from the 1950s? (I had to look up the century myself). This is yet another motion picture that has no fucking idea how Interpol truly works, so maybe it thinks agents such as Abby make a shitload of money)
One would think that planning the perfect heist would be a full time occupation, but apparently Cyrus has enough time to keep tabs on Abby without her noticing. He even knows which camera to glance at meaningfully, having somehow sensed that Abby is looking at him on a monitor at that exact same moment.
Anyway, Cyrus’s plan is to drive up the price of the NFT by making the world believe that N8 was kidnapped. The scheme succeeds, not least because Cyrus did kidnap N8, even if Cyrus’s accomplice Camila (Úrsula Corberó) refers to it as “borrowing a human” (which actually makes it sound a lot fucking crepier).
Moreover, N8 goes along with the ruse but only after Cyrus has sold the NFT for $89 million and offered N8 a $27 million cut (N8 already resembled Cyrus and his cronies in that he doesn’t have a real job; he turns out to be equally dishonest as well); that, however, doesn’t change that Cyrus originally lured N8 to his yacht under false pretenses.
(Incidentally, Cyrus tells N8 that “nobody gave a shit about [the Mona Lisa] for 400 years until someone stole it. That smile is now worth $860 million because there’s a crazy story behind it.” While there is truth to that statement, it’s not the irrefutable stealing-is-good argument that Cyrus seems to think it is — but then, Cyrus had lost any potential credibility he might have ever had when he declared, mere seconds before, that “Leonardo da Vinci sold The Mona Lisa for $25,000.” That right there may very well be the single dumbest fucking line of dialogue ever uttered in a movie. Nigga, at least say that it was the equivalent of $25,000 or something like that)
Then again, it’s all pretense with Cyrus. When N8 asks him if he and his cronies are “thieves,” Cyrus claims that “We rescue works of art from undeserving owners” — a perfectly factual declaration so long as you substitute ‘steal’ for ‘rescue’ and ‘rightful’ for ‘undeserving’ —, adding that, while all of this nonsense has been going on in Venice, “The rest of our team was in London, rescuing a Van Gogh.”
Cyrus and Camila further assure N8 that Cyrus buying and selling N8’s NFT was “a legit transaction” because they “presold” the Van Gogh for precisely $20 million (good thing none of the legitimately rich assholes at the auction thought to bid $20,000,001).
That’s the Van Gogh they rescued stole in London. Oh, and they presold it “on the black market.” First of all, do people who shop on the black market tend to pay in advance? And second, is that seriously what you call “a legit transaction”?
The alleged heroes’ blatant use of doublespeak is appalling (a particularly egregious example is when Cyrus expressly instructs Camila not to say “hijacking” when they’re talking about, and there’s that word again, “borrowing” a plane), all the more so because it goes unchecked; as far as Cyrus is concerned, he’s just calling it like he sees it, and by never proving him wrong, the filmmakers tacitly agree that he’s right.
That said, the protagonist is never more insincere than in his halfhearted attempts at pathos. Like when he justifies “breaking the rules” by asserting that “The rules were already broken for someone like me.”
Someone black? Is that what Cyrus is implying? And yet he remembers dismissing school because it was a conformity factory, which means that at least he had a chance at an education — which is a lot more than a lot of people can say — and decided to blew it instead.
And Abby — because all the other characters exist exclusively to validate Cyrus’s warped worldview — who had chosen to uphold the law ever since someone stole a “Hockney print” from the school at which her mother was a headmistress (the only time in the entire movie that a character’s motivations ring true), ends up drinking Cyrus’s Kool Aid (and the filmmakers undoubtedly expect the audience to do likewise).
Given that it’s near impossible to root for this pack of hypocrites (as dirty rotten a bunch as Ocean’s Eleven minus the oodles of effortless charm and charisma), writer Daniel Kunka and director F. Gary Gray try to manipulate the viewers by pitting the protagonists against a greater evil (oblivious that two wrongs don’t make a right).
Abby tracks Cyrus down and offers him a deal; steal “half a billion dollars in gold” from evil banker Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno), and in exchange “it’s full immunity for you and your crew.” I could try to explain what this gold thing entails, but why bother? It’s around this point that the script starts flip-flopping around like a motherfucker, favoring convenience over logic.
For instance, Abby seems pretty sure that Cyrus & Co. “are looking at kidnapping, wire fraud, identity fraud, and transportation of stolen property.” But when Cyrus insists that “that NFT was a completely legitimate transaction,” Abby changes her tune and brings up the stolen Van Gogh; “We caught your buyer. He gave up Denton, Luke, and Magnus,” all of whom are Cyrus’s cohorts.
Okay, so Luke (Viveik Kalra) and Magnus (Billy Magnussen) stole the Van Gogh, but Cyrus and Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio) were in Venice when that happened; why would Cyrus sweat that? This crew is depicted as your standard Fast & Furious-esque ‘family;’ surely Luke and Magnus wouldn’t spill the beans that they stole the Van Gogh on Cyrus’s orders?
They actually might, considering that, when Abby mentions the possibility of “20 years to life” to Denton — whom Cyrus, Camila, and Mi-Sun (Yunjee Kim) left behind in Venice —, Denton is suddenly very eager to help Abby find Cyrus. Oddly, Cyrus doesn’t hold this against Denton, and the entire crew is able to work together even though we’re given every reason to believe that trust (or lack thereof) should be an issue among them.
Cyrus is hesitant about messing with Jorgensen, so Abby switches gears (perhaps she should have arrested him first and then offered him the deal, but I suppose that would have made too much sense for this retarded fucking movie); “Camila hasn’t seen her family in eight years. Mi-Sun has a grandmother who doesn’t have long to live. Luke gets to see his poodle again. Magnus gets to go to the Cajun Stage at Jazz Fest.”
Uh, is she tugging at Cyrus’s heartstrings, or ours? I think the idea is for us to feel sorry for these people, but that dog won’t hunt, Monsignor. Whose fault is it that “Camila hasn’t seen her family in eight years”? Or that granny may die without saying goodbye to Mi-Sun? (also, if Abby had nothing on them prior to the NFT/Van Gogh affair, what exactly kept them from seeing their families? Unless they just didn’t want to). This conversation, mind you, takes place in Cyrus’s ultra-luxurious penthouse; it’s safe to assume that the others have comparable digs. My heart bleeds for them.
Unbeknownst to both Cyrus and Abby, Commander Dennis Huxley (Sam Worthington), “London Metropolitan Police Service, seconded to Interpol Anti-Terrorism,” plans on stealing the stolen gold. If Huxley only intended to ‘rescue’ the gold from ‘undeserving owners,’ that would be all right — at least according to the film’s twisted ethos.
The only difference between Cyrus and Jorgensen/Huxley is that the latter are ready and willing to exert lethal violence on their enemies. Sure, killing is comparatively a more serious offense than stealing, but there are laws (even commandments, if you want to get theological about it) against both crimes; to make one punishable and the other rewardable is shamelessly duplicitous (there are exceptions, of course, like killing in self-defense; Cyrus, however, doesn’t steal out of necessity).
There’s nothing wrong per se with a movie in which there are only bad guys and worse guys. For example, there are no good guys in The Wild Bunch; on the other hand, everybody gets what they have coming to them at the end of The Wild Bunch. In Lift, conversely, the worse guys are there solely to make the bad guys look like the good guys by default.
What the filmmakers neglect to dwell upon is that having “all felonies wiped clean, past and present” doesn’t automatically effect a positive change on the characters, and “immunity” does not equal ‘repentance’ or ‘atonement.’
Cyrus et al are given a Get Out of Jail Free card, but they remain the same persons before and after, and the fact that they keep the gold makes it inescapably clear that they didn’t learn a goddamn thing from their actions, nor did they filmmakers from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (assuming that they’ve watched it).
Now, I’m well aware that Lift is just a silly comedy (not that this particular genre would be for some reason exempted from achieving the goal of didacticism which Bernard Shaw believed all great art should strive for); the question is, is this a laughing matter?
Not to me, but because your mileage may vary, let me rephrase that: can a funny movie be made about this subject? I don’t know that it can, but I do know that Lift isn’t it — and if we’re not laughing, it’s easier to zero in on the film’s many flaws, be they moral, narrative, or aesthetic.
Storytelling-wise, how Cyrus ultimately manages to steal the gold is a total cop out. The part of the plan that Abby “didn’t know about” (or anyone else, for that matter) involved, among other things, Luke pretending to remove himself from the heist.
Both Cyrus and Luke knew that Luke “was never out. He just had a different gig.” So why did Luke tell Cyrus that he was pulling out (“I couldn’t do it. It’s just not worth the risk … Sorry, boss”) during a private phone call that, as far as I can tell, no one is listening in on? Who were they trying to deceive? Other than the audience, that is.
Cyrus explains this and more to Abby in the movie’s dying minutes, and it’s obvious that the filmmakers are just pulling stuff out of their asses — retroactively fitting into the plot completely new information to fill gaps we didn’t even know were there until now, because they needed a happy ending (wherein the heroes and the gold live happily ever after), and it’s easier than devising an intricate yet plausible course of action than can unfold, naturally and organically, front to back without needing to tack an exposition-heavy epilogue onto the proceedings.
That is, in a nutshell, why most old-school heist flicks are superior in every way to most of their modern-day counterparts. Take Rififi, for instance: a marvel of showing-not-telling that left no doubt whatsoever as to the logistics of the burglary, and firmly believed that crime shouldn’t pay.
Finally, as for the aesthetic part, let’s just say that Lift boasts the least realistic, phoniest-looking, illusion-shattering, suspension of disbelief-killing, computer-generated aerial stunts since Top Gun: Maverick. This is actually somewhat appropriate, what with everything else in the movie being irredeemably bogus.