A closer look at 5 new Netflix releases that will dominate the streamer this week, including Kevin Hart’s new Heist movie Lift.
Netflix has inadvertently trained me to run for the hills whenever I see a new original movie from the streamer with Kevin Hart’s name on it. It’s not my fault. Time after time — thanks to objectively dumb films like Me Time, The Man from Toronto, and now the newly-released Lift — the end result of wasting 90 minutes or so of my life on Netflix releases like these is that I feel like I could have been doing something better with my time, I’m less inclined to try Netflix original movies in the future, and I sometimes get a little closer to just cancelling my subscription altogether.
Lift, the latest in Netflix’s bad string of Kevin Hart duds, is also the most high-profile new release coming to the streaming giant over the next several days, if that tells you anything.
The movie comes from director F. Gary Gray (Friday, Set It Off, The Italian Job, The Fate of the Furious, Straight Outta Compton), and Hart plays Cyrus Whitaker — the leader of an international crew of thieves planning an elaborate heist: The theft of $500 million in gold from a passenger plane at 40,000 feet. “I love the heist genre and the idea of pairing Kevin Hart with a world-class cast,” Gray said in a Netflix promotional interview. “I really felt for his character, Cyrus Whitaker, as he orchestrated an impossible global mission — as a director, tackling the seemingly impossible task of filming a global production is my everyday adventure!”
I’ll say this: The cast is certainly impressive.
