Kevin Hart doesn’t even get to be Kevin Hart in Netflix’s new Kevin Hart movie

Lifting, Netflix’s new action movie starring Kevin Hart, is a roguish, high-tech heist film about an unlikely band of desperadoes who use their thieving skills to save the world. The makers, led by director F. Gary Gray and Hart as producer, are clearly trying to find a place somewhere between the Ocean films, the Fast and Furious franchise and Mission: Impossible. It’s tempting to say that’s about as close as a Hallmark movie comes to a classic Meg Ryan romantic comedy, but that would be unfair to Hallmark movies. Hallmark movies have their own atmosphere, a soothing blandness that is at least partly the point. Liftinglike so much of Netflix’s action output, it’s a characterless, garish simulacrum that isn’t satisfying on any level.

It doesn’t fool anyone, though. You only need to see one frame of it Lifting, taken past the 10 minutes, to know that something is wrong. During those first 10 minutes we are introduced to Cyrus Whitaker (Hart) and his team of international art thieves: master of disguise Denton (Vincent D’Onofrio), pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen), engineer Luc (Viveik Kalra) and hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim). We see them pull off a daring art heist at a simultaneous auction in Venice and London, right under the nose of Interpol agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). The heist is quite entertaining and there is a real speedboat chase filmed on location in Venice.

Then the film abruptly descends into a sticky unreality in which it lingers for the rest of the 104-minute running time. The crew escapes and arrives on a superyacht with poorly rendered CGI on the outside and a brightly lit soundstage inside. There they sit around and explain how they pulled off the world’s first theft of priceless NFT art, an already antiquated concept that Daniel Kunka’s screenplay dates right back to 2020-2021. The rest of the film is shot almost entirely at sound levels and features the flat lighting, glassy photography, and weak FX that are the sad trademarks of most Netflix Original films. Nothing about it seems real.

That’s a bad start for a so-called world travel adventure. The action centers on fake London: Mbatha-Raw’s Abby manages to pin the Venice heist on Denton, who then uses them to blackmail Cyrus’ crew into landing a job for the good guys, at the behest of anti-terrorist agent Huxley (Sam Worthington). ). They must find a way to steal half a billion dollars in gold belonging to billionaire villain Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno) to stop him from financing a global terror campaign that he will use to short the markets.

Cyrus concludes that the only way to do this is while the gold is being transported (on passenger planes for some reason) between London and Zurich – in the air, using a modified second plane that flies directly underneath the plane, and the radar ‘steals’. signature, and fool air traffic control. Obviously Abby and Cyrus have a romantic history, and of course he convinces her to join the team.

That’s a ridiculous set-up, but it has some fun potential: cinema has a proud history of fun stunts involving planes flying close to each other, in such twisty and purposeful action sequences as 1996’s. Executive decision. Lifting looks cheap, has perfunctory characterization, and is weak in its attempts at humor – but if it at least pulled off a cleverly conceived heist, it could still do the job.

Instead, it fails at that too. It’s almost impressive how many of the threads of the set flow away and lead nowhere, and how many opportunities for action and tension are squandered or passed up. Several members of Cyrus’ team are given barely anything to do, stranded by the vague mechanics of the plot and half-hearted characterization. A last-minute twist cannot save the hopeless anticlimax that preceded it. Lifting looks and sounds like a heist movie (sort of), but Kunka and Gray haven’t put in the work to build one.

Image: Netflix

Even more baffling is the miscasting. This is a Kevin Hart movie where Kevin Hart isn’t even allowed to be Kevin Hart – presumably by design, given his producer credit. Cyrus doesn’t joke around or make up high-key comedic blunders. Hart goes for a charismatic cool-customer thing, an unflappable team leader like a Danny Ocean or an infinitely more relaxed Ethan Hunt. It’s a disastrously poor match for his energy, and he just flatlines, leaving a game of Mbatha-Raw in a vacuum to compensate.

Magnussen works hard to get a few laughs; I’m not sure what D’Onofrio thought he was doing, but he seems to find it funny, and that’s something, I guess. Everyone else looks lost, especially Worthington and Reno in the roles of plot mechanics with inappropriate accents. They seem to give up halfway through most lines in bored desperation, and who can blame them?

Gray is capable of more than this. His 2003 remake of The Italian track passed the test, his NWA biopic Straight from Compton was convincing, and The fate of the enraged is not the absolute worst Fast movie. Even his last flop, Men in Black: Internationalshowed more signs of life and originality than Lifting. But those were all real movies, even if they weren’t great movies. Lifting is barely a movie. It’s an empty, shiny stand-in for one. It’s the sparkly decoy that the thieves trade for the real thing while no one is looking.

Lifting now streaming on Netflix.