Film Review: Carry-On

Carry-On
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
DreamWorks Pictures, Dylan Clark Productions
Streaming on Netflix: 12.13

When I was a teenager in the ‘90s, I had a friend, Mike Fox, who used to make the most elaborate, very dumb but outrageously fun VHS home action movies. His magnum opus was a 45-minute Die Hard knock-off called Live Easy. I just ran into Mike about a week ago, and the memories that brought back could not possibly have better prepared me for Carry-On, the new Netflix Christmas action flick that wants to be a new staple of the season so badly that it could have been called Try Hard.

On Christmas Eve, Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Rocketman), is a TSA worker at Los Angeles International Airport who has just received glad tidings of great joy: his girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson, Feel the Beat, Purple Hearts) is great with child (well, good with child. She’s a few months away from greatness). Ethan, who has been coasting along ever since his application to the police academy was rejected, decides that it’s time to take his job and future more seriously, and immediately asks for a promotion. Ethan is given a trial run at  the baggage scanner on Christmas Eve—just in time to become the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He finds a stray earpiece in a bin, and when he puts it in, a mysterious Traveler (Jason Bateman, Arrested Development, Ozark) orders him to let a specific bag pass unchecked. Refusal, the man warns, will cost Nora—who also works at the airport—her life. As Ethan becomes an unwitting pawn in a dangerous plot, he must play along while finding a way to gain the upper hand and take control before a deadly disaster unfolds.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown, Jungle Cruise) is hardly new to the genre, and in fact, at times this feels so similar to his 2014 Liam Neeson thriller Non-Stop that it’s almost jarring. The difference is that despite constant logic lapses, plot holes and corny dialogue, Carry-On is a rollickingly entertaining throwback to the days of ‘90s cat-and-mouse action flicks like Die Hard and Speed, even if it never reached the inspired heights of those films. Carry-On plays as well as it dies by maintaining a tongue-in-cheek sense of fun that keeps you watching it with a smile even as you’re saying “Oh, come on!” The tight pacing is a key factor to holding it together, and while the action doesn’t kick into high gear until the third act, that third act is a blast, with a very fun chase scene deep inside the airport and a fight sequence in a moving car—underscored by Wham’s “Last Christmas”—that is far and away the best of Collet-Serra’s career. 

Perhaps even more important than the pacing of the tone are the central performances by Edgerton and Bateman, two highly reliable and incredibly charismatic actors who have sold far worse material than this in their day. Edgerton’s perennially youthful appearance and energy not only gives Ethan a young underdog quality, but oddly, the fact that he sometimes echoes the teenage wannabe action hero playing out a Die Hard fantasy is entirely a good thing. As long as Edgerton is having fun, we’re having fun, and Batesman’s dry delivery as he constantly toys with and needles Ethan is delicious, precisely because it’s Bateman. When he condescendingly calls Ethan “buddy”, it’s impossible not to think of Michael Bluth from Arrested Development talking to his son, George Michael, and that only adds to the gleefully self aware silliness. Danielle Deadwyler (Till, The Piano Lesson) as Detective Elena Cole, a cop whose investigation of a murder leads her right into the thick of the villain’s plot, is terrific, bringing a smart and capable presence but also never making the mistake of playing things too seriously. Theo Rossi (Sons of Anarchy, Emily The Criminal) chews the scenery with a maniacal grin as the Watcher, the chief cohort of Bateman’s Traveler, and if the movie wasn’t so comfortably rooted in camp, it would never work, yet here, it’s a hoot.

Carry-On is a rare “movie of other movies” that is all the better for never shaking that feeling. It’s neither original nor creative; it simply throws itself so fully into the excitement of a bunch of friends playing action movie with such vigor that you can’t help but love it. There’s no doubt that it benefits from being a direct-to-streaming release that requires no effort from the viewer, and I don’t know if I’d be quite so wholehearted in recommending the film if I’d had to brave traffic, weather and crowded theaters. This is a home movie, both in its method of distribution and in spirit, or at least it is if you ran with the kind of home movie filmmakers that I do (think Threat Level Midnight on The Office). So microwave some popcorn and settle in for a flight of fun, and check your brain at the baggage claim. You won’t need it. –Patrick Gibbs

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