The first thing in my mind upon streaming Netflix’s Carry-On is its airport premise takes place on a Christmas holiday, which instantly reminds me of Die Hard 2. While the latter is more of a high-stakes action thriller filled with bigger action, explosions and stunts, genre specialist Jaume Collet-Serra isn’t here to replicate the go-big-or-go-home thrills of Renny Harlin’s 1990 blockbuster. Instead, he prefers a low-key approach, relying more on building up the tension and suspense than going all-out.
The story goes like this: A young and lowly TSA officer Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) working at LAX. He recently learns his girlfriend Nora (a stunning Sofia Carson), who also works in the same airport but as a manager for the airport operations, is pregnant. The news somehow leaves him with a mixed feeling and not to mention his seemingly dead-end job at LAX remains stagnant for so long. Nora even tries to convince him to reapply for the LAPD after Ethan gave up his dream years ago.
Then comes the busier-than-usual Christmas Eve as he and Nora need to be on duty on that day. With Nora’s pregnancy and the fact that he needs more money, he tries to convince his boss, Phil (Dean Norris) to prove he can do more than his current job position. With a little help from Ethan’s friend and colleague Jason (Sinqua Walls), his boss agrees to put him in charge of bag scanning.
Well, that day somehow turns into a nightmare after a random female traveller hands him over a single piece of earbud, claiming it doesn’t belong to her. Just when Ethan wants to put it under lost and found, he receives a text message instructing him to put it in his ear. And later, a call from a mysterious man named Traveler (Jason Bateman) blackmailing him to let an incoming passenger’s titular carry-on luggage pass through the TSO checkpoint without any trouble. If he refuses to comply, he will have his accomplice (Theo Rossi) shoot his girlfriend with a high-powered sniper rifle.
Carry-On showcases the cold-blooded nature of Bateman’s Traveler right from the get-go in a prologue, making him a fearsome antagonist who considers himself a “freelance facilitator” later in the movie. His impassive voice from the moment he starts threatening Ethan to do whatever he wants further highlights Bateman’s nuanced acting playing against type. Other times, Bateman’s Traveler alternates between his smug personality and deceptively friendly demeanor, especially with the way he loves to take control over Egerton’s Ethan.
The latter is a nervous wreck and seemingly a loser who gets caught in a desperate, life-or-death situation. Egerton does a good job playing an everyman character convincing enough and every action he does throughout the movie comes from the result of improvising as he goes. And I’m glad Collet-Serra doesn’t turn him into an implausible or worst, indestructible action hero of sorts. Sure, there are moments that require your suspension of disbelief but at least Collet-Serra, working from T.J. Fixman’s reasonably tense screenplay, doesn’t stray too far to the point it veers off course.
The suspense mostly comes from the Bluetooth call interaction between Ethan and Traveler, which at times, the former would try to outsmart him (the parts revolving around his smartwatch and a bleach pen come to mind). It’s hard not to root for Ethan’s predicament as we witness him mostly on his own trying to handle the situation, even though he tends to make dumb and even costly mistakes. But he never gives up on continuing to make things right.
Clocking at two hours, the movie does suffer from a clunky storytelling, especially when it shifts focus to an LAPD detective Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler) gathers every clue about what happens at the place in the opening scene resulting in a fire and two dead bodies. Cole does what she can in her role and she’s even involved in the movie’s showy set-piece – a scene filmed entirely around the interior of a speeding car along the freeway before it leads to a crash. A scene like this is nothing new with I Saw the Devil and The Equalizer 2 doing them before with varying degrees of success. But it was still entertaining to watch, which also showcases Collet-Serra’s flair for thrilling action scenes.
Carry-On culminates in a riveting third act as Collet-Serra raises the stakes, even though the final showdown between Ethan and Traveler is somehow short-lived. A few shortcomings aside, Carry-On remains a return to form for Jaume Collet-Serra after missing the mark in Jungle Cruise, Black Adam and to a certain extent, The Commuter.
