There’s an art to movies that play well on airplanes. They must be interesting enough to maintain your attention as flight attendants jostle by with enormous beverage carts. The feature also needs to be easy enough to follow that you don’t lose the thread when the pilot interrupts to tell passengers about cruising altitude or turbulence or whatever. Thirdly, they need to look good in a way that still plays on a screen smaller than your tablet and closer to your face than any screen should ever be. Last but not least, they should be good enough that if you decide to revisit the film at home someday, they’ll still play. By these metrics, Carry-On is a plane film fit for the small seatback screen and your large at-home TV, in equal measure.
The new feature from director Jaume Collet-Serra’s recently confounding filmography is good enough, in fact, it serves as a reminder of what a bummer the modern film release landscape can be. Super cool of Netflix to give it a platform, but this is the kind of solid action filmmaking that deserves to be a sleeper hit in theatres. Carry-On should be a movie like The Negotiator or Premium Rush. The sort that no one would think of placing in their top 10, but most would respond, “Oh yeah, that was a good one,” when someone mentions it. Alas, we live in fallen world etc etc. So, rather than dwell on that, let’s talk about what makes Carry-On a fun time at your streaming device.
It all starts with the plot, a relatively straight-ahead effort meticulously laid out by writer T.J. Fixman. The veteran of video game scripting shows an affinity for well-structured action writing that grows in complexity as the story progresses, leaving room for pleasing twists and turns without becoming muddy. Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is a TSA worker whose Christmas gift is the news that his girlfriend, Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson), is pregnant. Unfortunately, he’s otherwise a bit of a Grinch. He has no particular love for Christmas from the jump. Even if he did, working LAX on Christmas Eve would certainly do much to sap it. Plus, he has no passion for his job, a consolation prize after failing in his bid to be a police officer.
Bad goes to much worse soon enough. In an attempt to at least pretend he has ambition, Kopek successfully lobbies to man an X-ray machine. Moments later, a text from an unknown number orders him to put in a seemingly errant earpiece. On the other end is “Traveler” (Jason Bateman), an amoral fixer. He orders our hero to let one bag of illegal materials go through the machine without inspection. Failure to do so will result in his loved ones—Nina especially—meeting a grim fate. A team of co-conspirators aid Traveler. Most prominently among them is “Watcher” (Theo Rossi, giving the minor role plenty of dead-eyed creepiness). The following 100 or so minutes is a battle of wills as Kopek does everything right and still loses to Traveler at almost every turn.
It’s not easy to make Egerton feel like an everyman, especially with that jaw and those cheekbones. Similarly difficult is the idea that Bateman might be a physical threat to the younger, spark-plug-muscled man. Still, Carry-On does it with relative ease. Egerton portrays half-buried panic well. See his work in last year’s Tetris, a film he was far better than, for another example. He’s no wild man, but his flickering eyes and herky-jerky movements capture how cornered the TSA agent feels without overexplaining.
Working with cinematographer Lyle Vincent, Collet-Serra matches this energy with the camera. The lens flits and bears down on its characters, but there is rarely a sense of the frantic. There’s a tightness to Carry-On’s vision that reflects its ever-increasing tension. Thus, when it does let loose—spinning down a luggage carousel, for instance—the moment registers as more than a showy flourish. You can feel the loss of control the way the characters do.
Bateman, on the other hand, is a laconic contrast. He gives great “omniscient bad guy” voice as he wanders the terminal, seemingly snacking his way through each restaurant’s appetizer menu. There’s a casual menace to his tone that fits with his conception of himself. He’s not a bad guy, per se. He’s just a guy who gets things done. Sometimes that means doing it for the bad guys, but it is just business.
Bateman’s even better when he’s on-screen, all shrugs and “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” hangdog expressions. He’s the banality of evil, a smarter-than-average guy utterly convinced of his own superiority. Traveler doesn’t see the lack of accountability for his actions as a flaw in the system or evidence of injustice. He sees it as a natural product of just how good he is at his job. In other words, he’s earned a life free of consequence.
As Kopek twists in Traveler’s net, seemingly only getting more ensnared, Carry-On uses every element at its disposal. There are surprises, and each feels, if not earned, certainly easy to understand. Collet-Serra smartly highlights early moments in the film that prove essential later without screamingly signposting them. It’s good storytelling, ensuring viewers are onboard for each payoff without the anticipation of those outcomes becoming a cloud that robs the present moment of its spotlight. That’s how one can appreciate a great music cue joke, one that will induce giggles in all but the staunchest adherents to Whamageddon, without missing the film’s strongest action scene.
That joke is like the film itself. Smart, well deployed, and disinterested in overstaying its welcome. Carry-On isn’t the best film of the holiday season, but it is one of the most satisfying.
Carry-On is boarding now at Netflix.