‘Carry-On’ Review: Jaume Collet-Serra Returns to Form with a Fantastic Netflix Thriller Starring Taron Egerton as a TSA Agent on Christmas Eve
David Ehrlich
For a minute there, it almost felt like we lost Jaume Collet-Serra. The Spanish-American filmmaker spent the better part of a decade establishing himself as a bonafide auteur of better than they have any right to be suspense thrillers about decent people — usually Liam Neeson — trapped in compromising positions, but it was always going to be a matter of time before Hollywood took notice of the ecstatic competency he displayed in mid-budget movies like “Non-Stop” and “Run All Night” and swooped him up into the big leagues. He didn’t belong there. “Jungle Cruise” and “Black Adam” were both the kind of misfires that people only talk about in the past tense; the kind that could’ve been directed by anybody, and ultimately felt like they weren’t.
Altogether, they represented the kind of setback that typically forces a director to slum it on a streamer until they rediscover their mojo. Lucky for us, Collet-Serra is one of the only serious filmmakers on Earth whose talents are best expressed through the sort of algorithmic schlock that Netflix pumps out on a weekly basis, and the very literal airport thriller he’s made for the big red content factory isn’t just an ultra-fun and relentlessly gripping return to form that revisits so many of the motifs that fans have come to expect from his work (e.g. public transportation, personal demons, and a working-class protagonist who’s manipulated to look like the bad guy), it rivals “The Shallows” as the most satisfying thing he’s made to date.
The film is called “Carry-On,” it stars Taron Egerton as a despondent TSA officer who’s coerced into letting a sociopathic Jason Bateman smuggle an extremely dangerous suitcase through the metal detectors at LAX, and its title is a cute little pun that helps to explain the personal stakes at play. You see, “carry-on” isn’t just a category of luggage, it’s also the mandate that Ethan Kopek has received from girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) after flunking the entrance exam to the police academy.
Ethan has been slumping his way through life ever since being denied a shot at his dream job, and all Nora wants for Christmas — and this is very much a Christmas movie, one that starts at dawn on December 24th — is for her man to be excited for his future again. You see, Nora has just found out that she’s pregnant, and the fact of the matter is that the future is bearing down on these characters whether Ethan is ready for it or not.
And so, as our hyper-photogenic young couple rides the shuttle bus to LAX (where Nora works as a supervisor of some kind), Ethan resolves to apply himself for the first time since he settled for his job at the airport. To angle for a promotion. To ask his boss Phil (Dean Norris) if he can get a trial run working the baggage scanners instead of just wanding people’s groins all day. To retake control of his life for the first time since one small part of it didn’t go to plan. Of course, the voices in our head tend to make that sort of thing feel easier said than done. In Ethan’s case, the loudest of those voices belongs to a smarmy and mysterious Traveler who speaks to him through an earbud that was left in his security lane — a voice that wrests control away from Ethan just a few seconds into his first shift behind the baggage scanner, and immediately starts threatening to kill everyone he cares about should he choose to ignore it.
T.J. Fixman’s airtight script effectively leverages the all too human weaknesses of its hero to sell us on the strained plausibility of his situation, and Collet-Serra doesn’t waste any time pressurizing the cabin for take-off. If the early back-and-forth between Ethan and the Traveler is forced to follow to a series of necessary but predictable beats (Ethan thinks it’s a joke, the Traveler convinces him otherwise; Ethan makes a few clever bids to let his colleagues know what’s happening, the Traveler nips them all in the bud, etc.), the banter between these characters is unusually pointed for such a scenario-driven thriller, and the popcorn butter nihilism that Bateman slathers over his dialogue lends a strange intimacy to the film’s central dynamic.
The two men have more in common than either of them would have expected, and it isn’t long before Ethan is having forthright heart-to-hearts with the disaffected voice in his head, as the Traveler mocks Ethan’s feelings of dejection while preaching that life is just about being paid the most money for the least amount of work, and that “fulfillment is a lie used to sell paper towels.” Skilled as Collet-Serra has always been at creating discrete episodes of suspension and relief (he takes great care to establish a memorable supporting cast, if only so that it means something to us when the Traveler starts putting them in harm’s way), part of the reason why “Carry-On” works so well is that it uses each of those episodes to stress the growing tension between a dejected kid who’s struggling to care about his life and the apathetic man he’s threatening to become.
Bateman’s casting isn’t so effective just because Collet-Serra was smart enough to weaponize the freeze-dried smugness that Bateman brings to even his noblest roles, or because it subverts the genre’s dependence on humorless criminal masterminds. It’s so effective because he was cast to play Tyler Durden. No, this isn’t the kind of movie where it turns out that Ethan has been talking to a figment of his imagination the entire time, but it is the kind of movie about a worker drone — at a very strange time in his life — whose inner demon suddenly take on a dangerous life of their own.
And while Ethan isn’t exactly the sort of role that’s due to become a soul-hollowed symbol of its generation, Egerton still commits to it with life-or-death aplomb. Layering the familiar boyishness he brought to the “Kingsman” franchise with a tenuous new maturity that you can see in the shape of his jaw, his performance makes the most of a character who’s caught between identities and struggling to recognize himself — a struggle that Egerton convincingly sublimates into the action of an increasingly ridiculous film that soon finds him sprinting across the terminal, and even fighting his way through the best action sequence that anyone has staged inside of an airport’s baggage sorting system since “Toy Story 2.” Probably. Much as “Carry-On” positions being a TSA agent as a miserable contingency plan for people who fail to join the police (it’s hard to remember the last time a film so effectively made me root for someone to become a cop), I still suspect that Egerton will never have to take his shoes off at the LAX metal detector again in his life.
But Ethan’s character arc isn’t quite enough to sustain this story for more than 100 minutes, as there’s only so many times he can do awful things to Nora and his colleagues in the interest of saving their lives, and so “Carry-On” introduces a few other bits of business to flesh out the Traveler’s evil agenda. None of them are as detailed or exciting as the film’s main focus, and all of them depend on Ethan’s inability to recognize that the Traveler can only kill so many people before LAX is forced to shut down, thus defusing his masterplan (though I suppose a case could kinda sorta be made that it wouldn’t?), but the film’s extra texture is entirely additive by the end.
If what the Traveler is trying to smuggle aboard a passenger aircraft is almost as irrelevant as why he’s trying to smuggle it in the first place, there’s still fun to be had in watching a major talent like Danielle Deadwyler let her hair down as the no-nonsense LAPD detective Elena Cole who’s trying to solve those mysteries before it’s too late. And what’s not to like about Josh Brener rocking a yarmulke as the Jewish data analyst forced to spend Christmas Eve typing names into a computer and saying things like, “Well, this case just got really weird,” or Logan Marshall-Green dropping in from the sky as a handsome agent who seems really eager to help out? Did I mention that “Emily the Criminal” breakout Theo Rossi sports a mustache as the sort of hench-creep who looks like he probably abducts little children for fun when he’s not firing the world’s largest sniper rifle?
“Carry-On” doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender. And as you smile at the movie’s sociopolitically ambivalent but narratively mega-satisfying final beat, there won’t be a doubt in your mind that Jaume Collet-Serra was the right person to tell.
Grade: B+
“Carry-On” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, December 13.
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