The ’80s and ’90s were a golden age of high-octane action-thrillers, and that tradition is continued with exciting aplomb by Carry-On.
Following two misguided forays into tentpole extravaganzas (Jungle Cruise, Black Adam), director Jaume Collet-Serra returns to the sort of terrain he successfully tilled with Liam Neeson in Unknown and Non-Stop via this fleet and clever tale of a TSA agent who finds himself blackmailed by a mysterious villain into letting a carry-on bag pass through security. A clockwork genre contraption that consistently devises new ways to keep its protagonist in do-or-die crisis, this breakneck Netflix offering confirms the enduring vitality of its chosen formula—and, in the process, proves an unexpected and welcome Yuletide streaming gift.
Ethan (Taron Egerton) and his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) are about to welcome their first child. Despite Ethan’s excitement about impending fatherhood, he’s worried that he’s not ready for the role, given that he failed to pass the entrance exam to become a cop and now toils away as a lowly Los Angeles TSA agent.
A former high school track star, Ethan is running away from his dream by standing pat in a job he doesn’t like—a state of affairs that’s obvious to everyone around him, including his boss Phil (Dean Norris) and his buddy and colleague Jason (Sinqua Walls). Nora, who also works at LAX, wants Ethan to give law enforcement another shot, which he’s unwilling to do. Still, he shows renewed initiative at work on Christmas Eve, thereby convincing Jason to give up his spot at the luggage security checkpoint so Ethan can demonstrate that he’s ready to “wake up” and commit.
Although this seems like a heartening step toward maturity, it turns out to be ill-timed. Discovering a Bluetooth earpiece in a luggage bin, Ethan receives a text telling him to use it, and when he complies, he’s informed by a mysterious Traveler (Jason Bateman) that he must let a forthcoming passenger’s bag pass through the X-ray machine without incident.
As Ethan learns, the baddie had planned to blackmail Jason by holding his family hostage. Even so, the Traveler and his techie accomplice (Theo Rossi)—who’s in a parking-lot van with the vehicle’s tied-up owner—easily switch gears and gain tremendous intel on Ethan which they use to pressure him to obey. “One bag for one life,” explains the stranger, and considering that the person whose fate hangs in the balance is Nora, Ethan does as he’s told, especially once his initial efforts to contact others for help (via his phone and smartwatch) are foiled.
Ethan quickly deduces that he’s being watched. Moreover, he figures out where the Traveler is located—specifically, in his immediate area—courtesy of the ambient noise in the background of the rogue’s constant commentary and instructions. Bateman’s heavy is a chatty villain; his eagerness to engage with Ethan about his life, failings, and future are a symptom of his arrogant belief that he has everything under control.
That he does, at least at first. However, T.J. Fixman’s sharp script soon throws various wrenches into his seemingly foolproof scheme, beginning with the fact that Ethan is a nervous wreck and his daring attempt to inform others about his predicament leads to an unexpected death that gets him removed from his post. Since the Traveler—who claims he’s not a terrorist but, rather, a mercenary “facilitator” of terrorist plots—plans to do something terrible, he won’t take no for an answer, and the immediate and perilous pressure he puts on Ethan drives the young man to take drastic measures to prevent things from completely unraveling.
Carry-On doesn’t immediately divulge the contents of Bateman’s ominous luggage nor his larger purpose. While those answers eventually come to light, they remain irrelevant MacGuffins; Collet-Serra and Fixman’s focus is always on Ethan’s moment-to-moment situation and the means by which he chooses between bad and badder options. The thrill is in the mechanics of the storytelling, and the film is an expertly executed apparatus, such that every early detail is designed to have an important narrative function, and even the most dubious of twists are handled with enough realism and muscularity to pass one’s bullshit detector. The director keeps the pace fast and the atmosphere tense, and his glossy visuals and swooping, racing cinematography contribute to the material’s propulsive anxiousness.
As Ethan copes with his nightmarish dilemma, local police officer Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler) slowly becomes aware of, and involved in, the case, and if she’s mostly a device, she’s nonetheless the recipient of the film’s showiest and loopiest centerpiece: a car skirmish in which Collet-Serra’s camera rotates around the interior of the vehicle as it careens wildly through freeway traffic.
The good and bad guys both have computer whiz accomplices, and Ethan and the Traveler eventually share more than a few face-to-face confrontations during which the latter taunts the former about his going-nowhere life and cowardly weakness. None of it is very realistic yet as a self-contained nail-biter, it works, utilizing its familiar setting—complete with lots of angry and frustrated airline customers—for crafty suspense.
Carry-On plays like a riff on Die Hard 2: Die Harder in which the hero isn’t a sarcastic rule-breaking superhero cop but a wimpy nobody in need of a kick in the pants, and Egerton exudes the right mix of stuck-in-a-rut defeatism and harried determination to hold the film together.
Bateman, meanwhile, channels his Ozark protagonist’s amorality for the cool, calm, and ruthlessly sociopathic Traveler, whose flat, business-like demeanor is reflected in his nondescript clothing and baseball cap. They make for a fine cat-and-mouse pair, and Deadwyler, Norris, and Logan Marshall-Green (as a Department of Homeland Security official assigned to assist Elena with her investigation) provide colorful, convincing support.
Collet-Serra’s latest is proof that, in fact, sometimes they do make them like they used to, and with the same degree of style, personality, and pulse-pounding momentum. It won’t win any awards or break any historic records, yet its workmanlike ticking-time-bomb efficiency and electricity are precisely the qualities too many modern mainstream movies lack—and which make Carry-On an entertainingly edgy trip worth taking.
