Carry-On is the latest thriller from Netflix and stars Taron Egerton, Sofia Carson, and Jason Bateman.
We’re well past the golden age of Die Hard knockoffs but the formula remains a very reliable one for making high-grade B-movies if you can assemble the right team to make it. Jaume Collet-Serra has a long history of being one of the best at exactly this kind of movie. He has a knack, a gift you might even say, for taking this kind of trope-y, mildly silly, slightly convoluted movies and reliably turning them into fun, compelling thrillers that are better than anyone would ever expect them to be.
But then Collet-Serra spent the last few years making big-budget movies with The Rock which each ended up being… not bad exactly but definitely not the kind of work where his voice as a director can be heard clearly. Indeed, in at least one case it’s so muffled by bad, obviously pre-vizzed special effects action sequences and clauses in The Rock’s contracts that prevent his films from taking any risks, it felt like we might have lost him entirely. Thankfully, he’s back where he belongs, making mid-budget thrillers.
Carry-On, then, is a welcome return to form. It’s not exactly “Die Hard but in an airport” (that’s Die Hard 2) but only because it’s actually “Die Hard 3 but in an airport.” Our protagonist, Ethan, a TSA Worker who failed the entrance exam for the police academy, is a guy who is coasting through life without a ton of ambition, and on Christmas Eve, is targeted by some bad people to make sure that a specific piece of luggage makes it through security and onto a flight. He can try to resist, but they’ll kill his girlfriend and/or co-workers, and so he has to find ways to figure out their plan and turn the tables on them whilst also keeping his friends and loved ones safe.
That’s it, that’s basically the whole movie, and while it sounds like -and is!- the kind of movie you’ve seen before, Collet-Serra manages to make it feel fresh, new, and exciting by staging some fun fights and chases that make excellent use of the various settings available in an airport, and by leveraging two great actors in the lead roles.
Ethan is played by Taron Egerton, best known for the Kingsman movies, who has spent the last few years proving himself as a great actor. It can sometimes be difficult to manage the kind of performance that requires one to be believably smart, capable, and charismatic and also aimless and unambitious, and at least a little afraid, but Egerton really rises to the occasion, and then when the movie needs him to run and jump and fight he had the physicality to pull all that off, too. As Ethan slowly works through his own self-doubt by foiling a terrorist plot, it’s very easy to get swept up in it and care because he’s just that good.
On the other side is Jason Bateman as the film’s bad guy, a terrorist for hire who we mostly hear as a voice in Ethan’s ear. Bateman is one of our great comedic performers but the same understanding of timing and tone that makes him a great comedian also makes him a great villain. He’s cool, calculated, methodical, funny, and at times almost relatable, and this sort of no-nonsense blue-collar working man just happens to be a guy who blows up planes.
More importantly, they’re great together. Most of their time is spent apart but in the scenes they share together in person are electric. Each of them understands the assignment and each of them commit, and it’s great fun to watch their cat and mouse game unfold.
There’s a host of great talent surrounding them, too. Dean Norris is here as Ethan’s boss, and Sofia Carson is the pregnant girlfriend. Danielle Deadwyler is fun as the police detective investigating what’s going on, and Logan Marshall-Green shows up as a good guy who couldn’t more obviously be a bad guy if he had a neon sign on his head. That may be a slight spoiler, but it’s also not because once again you’ve seen this movie before. All of these characters do just about exactly what you’d expect, and everyone is having a good time playing them, but they’re not exactly breaking the mold.
Still, in a film like this that’s ok. They need to be there to raise stakes and provide motivation and give us a fun “single take“ fight in a car (which might be the one place you notice some pretty overt effects work), and that’s all part of the fun.
Carry-On isn’t a new kind of film, but it is the kind of film that Jaume Collet-Serra consistently delivers on: it’s one of the best versions of this kind of film. He knows exactly what it is, leans into the tropes where it works, stages some really fun action, and gets great, charismatic performances out of his lead actors. It’s exactly what it needs to be, and being set at Christmas in a way that’s actually meaningful to the plot makes Carry-On a great addition to your yearly roster of holiday action thrillers.
Carry-On is now streaming on Netflix.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch, at the Netflix site.
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