Netflix hires Kevin Hart and Fast 8 director F Gary Gray for its own joshing heist thriller, Lift. Here’s the new trailer.
One of the obvious questions that arose from the original Fast And The Furious, way back in 2001, is why Vin Diesel’s group of bandits stole valuables from moving trucks. Wouldn’t it have been easier to wait until the trucks had stopped at, say, a motorway service station and then pilfer the goods?
Lift, the upcoming heist thriller on the way from Netflix, takes things a step further. Kevin Hart’s ‘international heist crew’ (to quote the film’s synopsis) decides it’s a good idea to steal half a billion dollars’ worth of gold from the back of an airliner. While it’s still in flight.
If all of this sounds as though Netflix desperately wants its own action-heist franchise to rival the aforementioned Fast And Furious, our suspicions are underlined by the presence of director F Gary Gray, who previously made The Fate Of The Furious, best known to its friends as Fast And Furious 8. Or Fast 8. Or F8 if you’re really into the whole brevity thing.
Read more: How the Fast & Furious films break the modern rules of sequel names
Like the Fast And Furious films, Lift features an eclectic cast of familiar faces, with Hart joined by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Vincent D’Onofrio, Billy Magnussen, Viveik Kalra, Yun Jee Kim, Jean Reno, and more besides. In fact, if you’re really fast with the pause button, you’ll even catch a glimpse of a concerned-looking Sam Worthington with some headphones on in the trailer below. We’re guessing he has at least a slightly larger role in the finished film.
The Fast series’ casual acquaintance with realism is present here, too, with Lift appearing to contain a sequence where its thieves build an entire working aeroplane out of what look like the reclaimed bonnets from 500 Ford Fiestas. Kevin Hart’s Scrapheap Challenge? We’d watch that.
Lift is due to appear on Netflix on 12th January. In the meantime, here’s that trailer:
