2024 | PG-13 | starring Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, Sofia Carson, Danielle Deadwyler, Dean Norris, Logan Marshall Green| directed by Jaume Collet-Serra | 1h 59m | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
It’s Christmas Eve at LAX. The busiest time of the year for the TSA with thousands of passengers racing to their holiday destinations. Amid that hustle and bustle, agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is slipped an earpiece. The voice on the other end (Jason Bateman, relishing the villain role) tells him that a package is going to come across the security belt and he either looks the other way or his girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), dies. What’s in the package, could put a plane full of innocent passengers in danger.
What a tight, high-concept, mid-budget action movie premise Carry-On has. Scripted by someone or something named T.J. Fixman (a script doctor pseudonym if I’ve ever seen one), Carry-On is a fun, old-fashioned throwback to the 80s/90s one-man-against-the-terrorists movies, particularly the airport set Die Hard 2. It hits exactly the right notes at exactly the right time and in a season of overly long, self-indulgent, CGI riddled big screen adventures it was exactly what I was looking for. That the movie feels tight at almost 2 hours is a testament to its pace and how it doesn’t overstay the what-would-you-do premise.
The premise puts us alongside Egerton’s Ethan, a low-level TSA agent who flunked out of the police academy and is going nowhere in his career, now facing the responsibility of a girlfriend with a child on the way. He’s been picked out by this particular shadowy terrorist group because he’s a nobody and Edgerton, despite years of action movie credentials (Kingsmen) plays him perfectly as a dopy everyman. Bateman, on the other hand, gets a chance to lean back into his Ozark menace with a deliciously campy voice performance (“Is anything I’ve said — funny”). Egerton tries everything he can to get someone’s attention but the all-seeing eye of the hijacked security system, and boss Dean Norris, thwarts him at every turn.
As a single-location thriller, Carry-On gets the most out of LAX, taking us into the backrooms and with the various personalities of its TSA agents, making some time for a few jokes at the testy passengers and the frustrating situation everyone is in. As a movie with the TSA and LAX logos all over it, I’m immediately skeptical that this script went through an approval to make sure their guys came out as the heroes – but, hey, that’s what these movies do. And even Bateman gets to quip that a TSA agent is like the janitor working for NASA “calling themselves an astronaut”. Point being, this movie knows how to explore and exploit the setting it’s trapped in, the opposite of what M. Night Shyamalan does with a concert in this year’s wasted potential Trap.
The movie has a lot more moving parts that I probably would have liked. It’s the law today to have a no-nonsense, brilliant female FBI agent (Danielle Deadwyler) following one step behind our hero to put together the backstory. This leads to a truly bizarre over-stylized car-fight scene where everyone turns into video game characters for a moment. But when the movie gets back to the cat-and-mouse game between Edgerton and Bateman, it works like gangbusters. I appreciated how nasty the answer to What’s in the case? was when we finally get it. Like all these movies, there is a twist with the ultimate villain doubling back on the US government itself – a twist that’s going to go down a lot better now than it did back in the early 2000s.
Carry-On is a welcome return to form (and the airport) for director Jaume Collet-Serra. I feared Collet-Serra had been swallowed up by the big studio machine with the recent churn-out of massive studio duds like Black Adam and Jungle Cruise. Before that he was still trying to recreate the Liam Neeson action movie magic with The Commuter and Run All Night. No, Carry-On is more like one of his best movies, Non-Stop, which often gets lumped in with the Liam Neeson revenge movies but is really a slick locked-door mystery on an airplane centered around a befuddled air marshal. Yes, Carry-On has a bit of flab on it, but this old fashioned, trope-filled thriller is also one of the most fun movies you’ll see this Christmas season.