Lift (2024)
Directed by F. Gary Gray
No — Lift is not especially woke, scoring 24 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Lift arrives as a Netflix heist comedy, which is to say it arrives everywhere and nowhere at once, a Kevin Hart vehicle that moves $500 million in gold bullion through the thin air at 40,000 feet and lands with the soft thud of a pillow.
Consciousness Markers
The ensemble is conspicuously international and multiracial — Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Úrsula Corberó, Kim Yun-jee, Viveik Kalra, Jean Reno — assembled in the modern streaming-diversity manner, though the film never comments on it.
The antagonist is a greedy billionaire who engineers a continental flood to profit from stock manipulation, a textbook 'eat the rich' villain framing, though it is played for genre thrills rather than ideology.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Interpol agent and the female pilot/hacker are competent professionals, but the film makes no feminist argument and the women remain largely defined by the male lead's orbit.
A breezy Netflix caper that never stops to preach; the billionaire-villain framing carries a faint moral but is delivered as plot, not sermon.
A diverse cast exists naturally within the story, but race is never a subject, theme, or point of commentary.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the heist plot.
The villain's scheme involves flooding Europe, but purely as a stock-manipulation plot device; there is no environmental or climate message.
No body-positivity themes or messaging are present.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a contemporary fictional heist with no historical subject matter to revise.
Why it received this score
Lift arrives as a Netflix heist comedy, which is to say it arrives everywhere and nowhere at once, a Kevin Hart vehicle that moves $500 million in gold bullion through the thin air at 40,000 feet and lands with the soft thud of a pillow. F. Gary Gray directs with professional calm. The ensemble is conspicuously multinational: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Úrsula Corberó, Kim Yun-jee, Viveik Kalra, Jean Reno, a small United Nations of competent professionals assembled in the modern streaming manner. The film never remarks on this. It simply is. That restraint, whether by design or indifference, keeps the diversity from becoming a speech.
The antagonist is a billionaire named Lars Jorgensen who plans to flood Europe so he can profit from the resulting stock movements. This is the villain's motive, stated plainly, and it carries the faint aroma of a parable about greed. The film treats it as a plot device, a reason for the third act to have stakes, and no character stops to explain the moral. Abby, the Interpol agent, is capable and gets to punch her corrupt superior in the face, a small pleasure the screenplay grants without ceremony. The women in the crew are good at their jobs. They are also, mostly, orbiting Cyrus.
What Lift refuses to do is lecture. It has no interest in climate, in history, in the inner lives of anyone who is not holding a safecracker's stethoscope. The gold is gold. The plane is a plane. There is a heist, an NFT joke that already feels like a period piece, and a reunion of former lovers that resolves with the efficiency of a checked box. It is a breezy, forgettable caper, and its cultural footprint is light. We classify it accordingly, with no particular enthusiasm.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
An international heist crew, led by Cyrus Whitaker, race to lift $500 million in gold from a passenger plane at 40,000 feet.
Questions about Lift
Is Lift woke?
No — Lift is not especially woke, scoring 24 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Lift have any woke elements?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (50) and Eat the Rich (45). On Representation Casting: The ensemble is conspicuously international and multiracial — Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Úrsula Corberó, Kim Yun-jee, Viveik Kalra, Jean Reno — assembled in the modern streaming-diversity manner, though the film never comments on it.
How does Lift compare to other 2024 movies?
It ranks #58 of the 189 films from 2024 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is The Six Triple Eight (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.