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If you travel on the train into Waterloo Station, just before you pass through Vauxhall, you might notice a clear swimming pool suspended ten stories up between two apartments blocks. It’s just on the north side of the tracks near the Power Station. Made entirely of reinforced acrylic, it is the 14 metre middle section of a full 25 metre stretch that bridges the two buildings with the impressive transparent construction allowing swimmers to see right through to the ground below. Diving in has got to be a rush. It’s been there since May 2021 and I must have seen it hundreds of times on my journeys in and out of the capital,

and now I’ve seen it in a movie too.

I have to admit that it’s possible that this won’t be the most notable thing about this film for other people,

but it probably will.

It’s a nice pool.

Look, Lift is fine but other than the Battersea Skypool’s cinematic debut there is little here you won’t have seen before, and none of it is being done any more cleverly than has previously been the case. There’s an expert crew of jet setting super-thieves, and agent on their trail with previous romantic connections to the gang leader, a truly psychotic bad guy that you just don’t want to cross and a Secret Service boss who’s almost as callous.

The title in this context is another word for steal but we’ve seen so many great movies that revolve around this idea, from Ocean’s 11 to The Italian Job and this one doesn’t stand out. The location of the robbery is an airborne plane, which is clearly where they’ve tried to do something new but they don’t really make enough of it and the biggest result of this is leaving three of its cast with nothing to do but tap computer screens from their seats in the 1st Class cabin. Vincent D’Onofrio, who has just returned in his most powerful role as Wilson Fisk in the MCU/Disney+ show Echo, is one of them and I am actually not sure why he is in this film at all. The only thing his character seems to do is occasionally hand people things.

When I mentioned The Italian Job of course, I mean the 1969 original not the 2003 remake. This is significant because that latter film, fine but so inferior to its predecessor, shares a director with this one. I’m not going to come down hard on F. Gary Gray because he is the man who gave us the explosive girl crime drama Set It Off back in ‘96 but since then he has struggled to make anything as good. Despite making this and ‘The Italian Job’ though, I don’t actually think that giving the world another classic heist thriller is his dream. Rather it seems that this is actually his attempt to make another Fast & Furious film, like he’s been sitting by the phone since he made Fast 8 and got bored waiting. The style and tone of Lift is definitely in that area.

Star Kevin Hart is no Dwayne Johnson though. There have literally been several films whose entire premise is based on highlighting this very fact. For good or for bad, he’s no Vin Diesel either. This could be deliberate counter-casting but there is a fine line between that and good old fashioned miscasting and I can’t decide which this is.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is in this too and better shows herself to suited to the action. Let’s hope she picks a stronger one next time. My main question in relation to her though is, as the only other actor in the scene in question, was whether she got to for an elevated swim in that pool as well as Hart.

You’d kind of have to wouldn’t you, 115 feet up with seemingly nothing between you and this air? It would be amazing.

God, I love that pool!

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