Perhaps good things happen in airports on Christmas Eve in real life, but never in the movies. Carry-On is no exception, a reasonably diverting thriller that nonetheless feels a little underwhelming due to the presence of director Jaume Collet-Serra, late of punishing blockbuster duty after Jungle Cruise and Black Adam. The filmmaker here returns to the lo-fi suspense bread and butter that endeared him to a whole generation of action junkies.
As mentioned, it’s Christmas Eve at LAX, and as if it’s not bad enough that low-level TSA checker Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is late for his shift, his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) is pregnant and needs Ethan to step up and show a little ambition. Careful what you wish for, honey. Opportunity strikes when Ethan begs for a little more responsibility on the job at the exact moment that a team of baddies led by “The Traveler” (Jason Bateman) shows up. It seems they have a penchant for forcing ordinary citizens to do their evil bidding, and in this case, they intend to use Ethan to smuggle a mysterious suitcase through bag check and onto a commercial flight.
Collet-Serra’s patented facility with closed spaces and action geography works wonders for the many scenes in Carry-On that mostly take place in a large airport security checkpoint, with a lot of suspense created by employing multiple perspectives and focusing on lines of sight between the characters. There are also multiple sequences in the conveyor belt labyrinth of baggage handling, which offer a lot of giddy fun for viewers. In other words, this is the work of a director who understands how to maximize setting and space, and his execution here gives you the sense that he missed this during his tentpole forays.
That said, Carry-On isn’t a particularly reconstructed work. Even lay viewers have seen this movie a dozen times, but there are still some cheap pleasures to be had with the back and forth between the mastermind and the hostage as Ethan continues desperate but clever attempts to either get someone’s attention and help or to foil the Traveler’s plans altogether. Those attempts almost unfailingly get somebody killed in addition to being increasingly implausible, but Collet-Serra at least keeps things mostly moving at a good clip. The film’s major problem, then, isn’t its familiarity, but its other parallel half, which features a police detective (Danielle Deadwyler) who finds herself investigating the Traveler and his goons, and whose exploits outside the airport grind the film’s momentum to a full stop. Forcing these twin storylines to inevitably intersect at Carry-On‘s end utterly destroys the pace of these crushingly overlong two hours. Collet-Serra clearly understands the assignment and delivers sturdy work, but any time the movie steps away from its core premise and contained setting, it crashes.
DIRECTOR: Jaume Collet-Serra; CAST: Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, Sofia Carson, Theo Rossi; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: December 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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