The ‘Straight Outta Compton’ director helms a Netflix feature about an alliance between an internationally wanted thief and an Interpol officer.

The first target is an art auction in Venice. Led by their aspirationally stoic chief, Cyrus (Kevin Hart), the crew at the center of Netflix’s distrusting heist film Lift prepare to steal fine works from the clutches of the one percent. This squad — an efficient group of tech geniuses and masters of disguise — see themselves as cultural Robin Hoods. They take from the rich to line their pockets, screw the wealthy and help the artists. 

This brightness doesn’t seem to bother Cyrus, who saunters to his assigned seat while checking in on his team via mic. When the auction begins, he bids millions on an NFT by the anonymous artist N8 (Jacob Batalon). There’s still promise at this point in Lift as we build an understanding of the dynamics at play. Watching Cyrus, Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), Camila (Úrsula Corberó), Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim) and Luke (Viveik Kalra) work the room and the area surrounding the auction house is Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). She’s an overachieving federal agent who leads a group dedicated to tracking and arresting Cyrus and his bandits. 

Here lies an opportunity to comment on a visual art world sustained by hype, and to create intrigue around a group that plays into it because stolen goods, in their experience, bestow a rarefied status. Instead, Lift constructs this moment so Cyrus can walk N8 through each step of their heist and explain the group’s mission. There’s no need to hypothesize on motivations, individual or collective, in Lift. Cyrus will explain it sooner or later. That deflating realization forced this critic to rewatch a classic (Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake) to remind herself that yes, this genre could be fun.

The staged capture of N8 leads into the real drama of Lift. After a conversation with her colleague Huxley (Sam Worthington), the director of a more “serious” Interpol department, Abby is forced to recruit Cyrus’ crew. Huxley has his sights on a bigger target: Jorgenson (Jean Reno), a billionaire who profits off of manufactured destruction. He’s recently cut a deal with an anonymous hacker group to tap into the grids over the world and cause mass flooding. More exposition clues audiences in on the plan: Abby must get Cyrus and company to steal millions of dollars of gold from a flight without Jorgenson finding out. 

If you’re still on board at this point in the film (this is all within the first 20 minutes) then you’ll also find out that Abby and Cyrus have history, which complicates their current relationship. It should also add tension to the dynamic, but that’s virtually undetectable. For all their respective talents, Hart and Mbatha-Raw are mismatched, and Daniel Kunka’s screenplay doesn’t give their connection enough time to gestate. Abby and Cyrus’ romance lives in expository recollections of their childhoods and a whirlwind week together.

Cyrus agrees to help Interpol in exchange for immunity, and the crew sets off to work on their biggest heist yet. As with all great heists, there is a level of impossibility and a risk to their lives. Motivated by a surveillance-free future, Cyrus and his fellow thieves formulate a plan to retrieve the gold from the plane, offer Jorgenson up to the authorities and save lives.

The rush of scheming gives Lift a necessary injection of thrills. Even if the technology veers toward the unrealistic, Gray is a skilled enough director that these scenes of tech acquisition and tricky execution add a minor sense of urgency to the proceedings. It’s not enough to save Lift, but it does make the film feel a little less ridiculous.