Critic Reviews

The result is a genuinely funny and ultimately heart-pounding production, with an executions that feels like a heist itself.

Minus the flash, the neon, the tailoring and the quipping, LifeHack is a kind of Ocean’s Eleven for Gen Z: a breathless, ingenious caper that moves at about 200 megabits per second.

LifeHack is a captivating, exhilarating, and full-speed heist thriller that marks one hell of a feature debut.

LifeHack is consistently intriguing for the conflicting emotions with which it looks back on its chosen moment in tech and time, characterized by cutthroat scamming and cynicism, as well as empowerment and camaraderie for the young and quick-witted.

It may feel like damning with faint praise, but “LifeHack” is easily one of the more tolerable screenlife thrillers of recent vintage.

The internet is the closest thing these teenage cyberthieves have to a real life, and Corrigan’s dopamine onslaught of a film is an authentic portrait of the most alive they’ve ever been.

By putting us inside the internet, Corrigan makes their insular world feel uncomfortably close to ours.

While there’s not exactly a surfeit of character development, the screenplay co-written by Corrigan and Hope Elliott Kemp provides just enough motivation to keep us interested in more than just the caper.

The film’s adherence to these genre cliches, along with the characters’ very one-note motivations, holds “LifeHack“ back from reaching the tier of excellent heist films and, more importantly, settles for the best that a screenlife film can be.

Corrigan approaches his film's many user interfaces with a show-don't-tell philosophy. Every click, every keystroke, is treated like an opportunity to reveal personality. It not only keeps the screenlife conceit interesting, but makes it feel vital.