Lift (2024)'s Ending, Explained

When it comes to Hollywood’s top comedy stars, Kevin Hart may well be the biggest draw of them all. Apart from his many stand-up specials, Hart has been in movie franchises such as Ride Along, Jumanji, and even the Fast & Furious universe. There, audiences have seen his range, especially with co-stars such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. However, Lift gives him a leading action role rather than the usual jokes many associate him with.

The Netflix movie focuses on Hart’s Cyrus, a serious mastermind along the lines of Dominic Toretto. He runs with a versatile crew that specializes in hacking, stealing and then covering up tracks, which leads to Interpol recruiting them for a high-octane heist in the sky. Cyrus’ team has to steal a safe of gold from an airplane before it reaches a sinister aristocrat known as Jorgensen. If they don’t abide, they face a lengthy prison sentence. In the process, Cyrus’s mission unravels themes of drama and romance, among the many, making Lift effusively intriguing as it goes along.

Lift’s Heist Goes Awry

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Cyrus has to work with his ex, Abby (played by Loki’s Gugu Mbatha-Raw) — something he doesn’t mind as he still loves her after a fling where they hid their true identities from each other. She is the agent who Interpol wants to oversee the case, but little do her superiors know she still has feelings for Cyrus. Even though she denies it and abhors how Cyrus lied to her, she is locked into his charm, charisma and how the crew only steal from the snobbish elite who deserve it. The complex plan begins with Cyrus’ crew using a high-tech plane they seize to sneak alongside the target plane.

This getaway plane is cloaked, not to mention, Cyrus’ crew uses a drone to remove the signal from the target plane and have the drone fly off to make the authorities think everything is going well. The plan is to land at a secret location and make the transfer to their plane, spiritually nodding to the smash-and-grab of properties such as The Italian Job and, of course, the Ocean’s Eleven series. Unfortunately, their plan hits turbulence midair. When the henchmen on board learn the target plane is being goaded to land at another destination and not Jorgensen’s intended Zurich bank, they decide to take things into their own hands. They need the gold to get to Zurich so, Jorgensen can give it to the nefarious group, Leviathan, and have them perform terrorist acts on his behalf. This would enable him to obtain stocks and make billions.

Knowing the boss won’t be pleased, the henchmen hijack the plane and batter people on board. It results in Cyrus’ crew fighting back, but losing. As a result, both planes have to land off-grid, which results in the henchmen taking over Cyrus’ plane. They suss out Cyrus’ scheme and quickly shift the plan. They engineer a new route, so they can meet Jorgensen and Leviathan at the boss’ Tuscany villa. This way, the deal can go down and Cyrus’ crew can get punished by the boss. He wants an in-person session because he hates how Interpol tried to circumvent the law, knowing that while it is legal for gold to be in transit, they still had an option to steal it with Team Cyrus.

Lift Uses Its First Heist As the Key

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Unfortunately, Jorgensen’s diplomacy leaves a lot to be desired in Lift. The Leviathan representative reprimands him for being incompetent and inconsistent over a simple transfer of the bullion. Enraged, the egotistical Jorgensen shoots the intermediary dead, leaving Cyrus, Abby and the squad petrified. Thankfully, the Italian police arrive after Interpol tried to use NATO to shoot Cryus’ plane down.

Jorgensen tries to pin the murder on Cyrus, but luckily, Cyrus’ team has the NFT technology they used from their first heist. That incident saw a mysterious artist, N8 (played by the MCU’s Jacob Batalon), employ high-tech cameras and a special mask to create a unique moment in time. Cyrus and Co. stole this and made millions before setting N8 free. The technology is then used by Cyrus to help his pilot get under the target jet and steal the black box signal. Basically, the technology acts as a surveillance camera that can record footage from a 360-degree angle, giving near-flawless playback. Cyrus improvises at the mansion and activates the plane’s outer screens, enabling the replays to show Jorgensen’s act in high-definition resolution. This allows the police to take the villain and all his thugs down.

It’s a sneaky play, but it ties into how Cyrus has always said they need to evolve with technology. They initially stole traditional art, leaving people questioning why they would sully their style and go after NFTs. Here, as fate would have it, that job has a massive ripple effect as it provides what they need to be exonerated. They hold up their end of the bargain, encouraging Interpol and Abby’s boss, Huxley (Sam Worthington) to expunge their records and let the thieves go free. However, Team Cyrus has one more slick twist to reveal.

Lift Copies an Ocean’s Twelve Trick

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Abby doesn’t like Huxley’s disposition throughout the movie. He does dehumanize them a lot, which upsets Abby. The finale has her resigning, but not before punching Huxley out. She gets word he begged the NATO jets to shoot the plane down with the gold, just to spite Jorgensen. Luckily, the thieves were able to use the technology on board and let the jets know there were innocents inside. Abby ends up meeting Cyrus and his crew, and as expected, she joins.

She’s taken aback by Cyrus finding a painting that was stolen from her school decades ago — one he restores at the establishment, so it can inspire the students the way it did Abby. This cements that he is indeed her soulmate. Secondly, Cyrus reveals they actually stole the gold. The villains didn’t know Cyrus’ vault cracker, Magnus, swapped the gold with a safe filled with gold-painted metal. He ejected the initial safe into the ocean early on, with Cyrus’ other colleague, Luke, picking it up. It leaves Huxley irate when he opens the plane’s safe and finds the fraudulent gold. It plays on Cyrus’ big mantra — something seen in many heist movies and shows: misdirection.

Fans of the spy and heist genre would also recognize how this remixes what Ocean’s Twelve did with Brad Pitt’s Rusty and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Isabel. The latter was an Interpol agent chasing Rusty down, only to realize the thieves were her kindred spirit. She and Abby fought this side of themselves, but the concept of true love lured them to criminiality. Ocean’s team did steal the Fabergé egg, swapping it with a fake one that left the Night Fox annoyed. He stole the fake egg, not realizing Ocean’s crew had already lifted the genuine one in bus transit, and handed it off to Toulour (Isabel’s father) to win their rivalry against the Night Fox.

The way Danny and Rusty lied to Isabel to get the egg to Toulour is mimicked by how Cyrus hides the true heist from Abby. Both sets of thieves couldn’t risk the Interpol agent betraying them, so they used the ladies to build distraction, unpredictability and suspense. Rusty reunited Isabel with her father and got her to admit her true nature. The catalyst for that was how Isabel clung to the idea of family again. After the heist in Netflix’s Lift, Abby undergoes this same journey, not caring how she was duped. She has her Rusty in Cyrus, and at last, a family that she has come to care for more than what she had back in her robotic, soulless Interpol job.

Lift is now available to stream on Netflix.

Lift

Follows a master thief and his Interpol Agent ex-girlfriend who team up to steal $500 million in gold bullion being transported on an A380 passenger flight.

Release Date

January 12, 2024

Director

F. Gary Gray

Cast

Kevin Hart , Gugu Mbatha-Raw , Sam Worthington , Vincent D’Onofrio , Úrsula Corberó , Billy Magnussen

Runtime

1 hour 47 minutes

Main Genre

Action