"The heist begins at 40,000 ft."
Lift (stylised as LIFT) is a 2024 Action Comedy Heist Caper film directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job (2003), The Fate of the Furious), and written by Daniel Kunka (12 Rounds).After a successful heist on an auction by a Caper Crew, INTERPOL agent Abby Gladwell (Gugu Mbatha Raw) is tasked by Commander Huxley (Sam Worthington) with hiring this same crew to take down Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno), a reclusive billionaire that wants to buy a program from a hacker group, Leviathan, that lets them control all utility services that are connected to the internet. Leviathan intends to use this program to wreak havoc via mass flooding, while Lars uses stock market manipulation to profit off of the deaths the flooding would bring. The crew, consisting of Abby's Old Flame and the The Leader of the crew, Cyrus (Kevin Hart), Denton (Vincent Donofrio), Camilia (Ursula Corbero), Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Luke (Viveik Kalra) and Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim) is tasked with stealing a crate of gold bullion from a plane set to leave Heathrow in a matter of weeks, which will give INTERPOL the go-ahead to investigate Lars and take him down.
The film was released on Netflix on January 12, 2024.
No relation to De Lift, or Elevators in general.
Previews: Official Trailer
, New Years Final Trailer.
Lift provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Abby and Camilia are seen fighting and participating in chase scenes multiple times.
- Big Bad: Lars Jorgensen and Leviathan both share this: the latter is set to be paid in gold by the former so they can control any utility system in the world, giving Lars carte blanche to profit off of the misery of others via shorting stocks as he causes flooding and mayhem. Subverted when Jorgensen murders the Leviathan leader when she tries to back out of the deal.
- Caper Crew:
- Cyrus (The Boss)
- Camila (The Pilot)
- Mi-Sun (The Hacker)
- Magnus (The Safecracker and Gadgeteer Genius)
- Luke (The Engineer)
- Denton (Master of Disguise...sort of)
- The Con: For a film focusing on a Caper Crew, there's no actual con being shown for almost the entire runtime. The opening featuring the crew taking the Van Gogh as a part of a simultaneous caper is just theft, not a con, while the NFT heist was actively beneficial to "N8", and they even "kidnap" them to show how their disappearance made their NFT skyrocket in value, and Cyrus even gives them a cut of the profits and they don't try to intimidate them. Ultimately averted however, as it's revealed by Cyrus near the end of the film that the gold bullion was swapped for fake iron bars so INTERPOL would never get the gold but still could prosecute Lars, and was an Unspoken Plan Guarantee aimed at Abby so they wouldn't turn them over to INTERPOL.
- Chekhov's Gag: Mollson, a silicon valley Tech Bro the crew meet earlier at the auction house has a plane decked out in LCD panels, and Mollson writes some odd things on there for a laugh to show off and flaunt their wealth. This turns out to be useful later on as this is used to send a message to the NATO Pilots that there are hostages on-board and shouldn't be shot down.
- The Dragon: Cormac to Lars Jorgensen.
- The Dreaded: Leviathan rattles Abby once Huxley tells her they then plan to take Lars down, and Lars himself elicits an Oh, Crap! from Cyrus and his crew:Cyrus: "There are people you steal from, and there's people you don't steal from — Lars Jorgensen kills both".
- The Faceless: "N8", the artist Cyrus's crew kidnaps, is initially shown wearing a golden mask and a voice-changer. They're a
Reclusive Artist, and takes measures to conceal their identity when they appear publicly. Their identity is revealed before the main plot begins, and are bald, male, and quite the Life of the Party. - Jerkass Has a Point: Huxley may be a jerkass to Gladwell and Cyrus, but he wasn't wrong about how ruthless Lars Jorgensen is.
- Meta Guy: Magnus is the most Genre Savvy of the crew, clearly believes the plane heist is something out of Hollywood, and repeatedly lampshades common Caper Crew tropes.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Denton comes off as The Ditz, but is far more cunning than he lets on, which in his line of work is rather the idea. On the flight mid-way through the film, he pretends to be an elderly flight-goer who cannot work the in-flight media system to distract the hostess.
- An Offer You Can't Refuse: INTERPOL manages to successfully pin the stolen Van Gogh that Cyrus's crew stole at the beginning of the film. They use this as leverage to make them steal gold before Lars gets his hands on it so an official investigation by the agency can take place. Cyrus, wanting to avoids jailtime, accepts the offer Huxley proposes.
- Playful Hacker: Mi-Sun, who wears sunglasses that can hack into anything nearby and let her remotely control them, such as a fire alarm in a building.
- Race Against the Clock:
- The heist is set to take place within 17 days of INTERPOL hiring the crew. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the gold is being moved earlier than expected, and the timeline gets cut down to ten days, something which concerns Cyrus enough to try and break off the crew to let them walk away without shame.
- The overriding of the plane transponders requires strict timing, and at one point Abby has to fake the Mile-High Club experience with Cyrus to put the transponder back together after breaking it.
- Running Gag: Whenever Abby mentions that helping to steal the gold will come with the benefit of "saving lives", anyone responding to this point just shrugs it off, or jeers, and some are just incentivised by the pay, rather than anything moral.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Huxley's Non-Answer about the fighter pilot situation (which he helped to scramble, and outright encouraged them to open-fire upon Cyrus's crew and Abby so the gold would never reach Lars), Abby finally quits INTERPOL on the spot out of disgust, and joins Cyrus and his crew.
- Title In: The film uses the Captain America: Civil War-style of representing place names with big text that are blended into the location, and only swaps the location for the country if it's impossible for the audience to recognise (such as the shed in the middle of Northern Ireland Cormac tortures Arthur Tigue in).
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The film focuses on getting the gold from the plane, but doesn't show the gold being replaced by iron fakes made by Magnus while Cyrus was hiring Harry to work at the air traffic control. They had simply made sure that they were placed in the same planes' cargo hold alongside the real gold bullion. Once the gold was removed from the safe, Luke (who had excused himself to Cyrus over the phone before the plan starts by dropping out under the cover of last-minute pressure getting to him, knowing that Abby would be nearby Cyrus) and helped to jettison the gold bars out of the plane by guiding it via remote control to land in a river for pick-up a few weeks later once the snow had cleared. None of this is revealed until right at the end, and was kept secret from Abby, presumably because of their conflicting conscience of sticking with INTERPOL versus joining Cyrus's crew.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: While Huxley is an absolute Jerkass to Gladwell and Cyrus and attempts to knowingly have the jet they and the rest of Cyrus' crew are being flown in with the gold shot down, Huxley visibly shows regret while making the order and only does it in order to prevent the gold from getting to Jorgensen and Leviathan, so Jorgensen doesn't kill anyone.
- You Have Failed Me: Arthur Tigue, INTERPOLS' mole in Lars's organisation, gets killed by Cormac after revealing half the plan to INTERPOL, and Lars briefly tells Arthur of his fate via videocall.
