Lift

“Lift” is as generic and forgettable as its title, the kind of glossy, empty action picture that Netflix just keeps pumping out, whether we need it or not. It’s not as aggressively glib as “Red Notice,” for example, but rather is more in line with “The Gray Man”: Competently made and star-studded, with a couple of intriguing ideas, but hollow. 

Veteran director F. Gary Gray has made better action movies in the past (“Set It Off,” “The Italian Job”) and will likely do so again. Like so many films before it, “Lift” is about an eclectic collection of con artists trying to pull off a seemingly impossible heist. That premise offers some pleasures, especially as the assignment becomes increasingly complicated. But there’s so little to the characters in the screenplay from Daniel Kunka that it’s difficult to care whether they get away with it, and the special effects look so detached from reality that it often feels like we’re playing a video game.