Carry-On (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – A mysterious traveler blackmails a young TSA agent into letting a dangerous package slip through security and onto a Christmas Day flight.

My Take – Though he spent the better part of a decade establishing himself as an auteur of mid-budget genre exercises elevated beyond simple action-film fare due to the presence of some excellent B-level thrills and twists, Spanish-American film director and producer Jaume Collet-Serra (Non-Stop, The Shallows) ended up burning his reputation in the last few years by divulging in mediocre Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson led blockbusters, Jungle Cruise (2021) and Black Adam (2022).

Thankfully his latest, one of the most propulsive and entertaining thrillers to release on Netflix till date, is a massive return to form.

Working from an assured screenplay by T.J. Fixman (Ratchet & Clank), director Collet-Serra crafts a satisfying surveillance thriller, reminiscent of the good ol mid-90s flicks, that doesn’t have any lofty political or thematic goals. With its escalating complications and simple but potent premise, the film is the kind of lean, effective, unpretentious Hollywood crowd-pleaser that’s too rare in this day and age.

Simply told, it just wants to entertain you, and it trusts so completely in its story of a good man trying to find the right way out of an impossible conflict that it succeeds at doing just that.

Yes, it never goes anywhere particularly surprising, and the full scope of the antagonist’s plan only makes a paper-thin amount of sense. But the film plays its cards right and clips along at an adrenaline-pumping pace from beginning to end, trimming as much narrative nonsense from its prologue and climax as it can along the way.

Agreed, it won’t win any awards, yet it works very well because its intensity, efficiency and electricity are precisely the qualities too many modern mainstream releases lack, something which make the film an entertaining trip worth taking.

The story follows Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), a 30-year-old who believes he still hasn’t lived up to his full potential yet. After failing his police academy entrance exam some time ago, Ethan has resigned himself to an unfulfilling existence coasting along with minimal effort as a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport).

And with the news that his longtime girlfriend, fellow airport security worker Nora (Sofia Carson), is pregnant, Ethan is forced to start thinking about what kind of a life he wants for himself, Nora, and their future child.

When Nora further urges him to give his dream another shot, Ethan decides to try putting more effort into his life by petitioning his boss, Phil (Dean Norris), for a comparatively more important shift working baggage inspection on Christmas Eve.

But just when everything seems to be working well, Ethan subsequently finds himself in a nightmare of a position upon coming into the possession of an earbud that connects him with a smarmy and sociopathic Traveler (Jason Bateman), a self-described facilitator, who orders Ethan to let a specific passenger and his suitcase past TSA’s scanner and onto a packed flight in exchange for Nora’s life.

What unravels is a tense game of cat and mouse in which Ethan endeavors to thwart the traveler’s plans while being shut down at every turn. Mining the inherently stressful setting for all its worth, director Collet-Serra keeps us on the back foot throughout, the plot folding back upon itself repeatedly as the suspect suitcase slowly wends its way towards disaster.

Despite running for 119 minutes, the film wastes little time in trapping its unlikely hero in its central, seemingly inescapable situation. For the most part, the neat, unambitious thriller finds inexhaustible magic in its villain’s perfectly maddening arrogance and in Ethan’s internal struggle over his love for Nora and the responsibility he feels to the 250 passengers who will likely die if he does what the Traveler wants.

The film doesn’t immediately divulge the contents of the ominous luggage nor the larger purpose. While those answers eventually come to light, they remain irrelevant as the script’s focus is always on Ethan’s moment-to-moment situation and the means by which he chooses between bad and worse options. The thrill is in the mechanics of the storytelling, and the film is an expertly executed apparatus, such that every early detail is designed to have an important narrative function, and even the most dubious of twists are handled with enough realism and muscularity to pass one’s detector.

Most importantly, director Collet-Serra keeps the pace fast and the atmosphere tense, and his glossy visuals and swooping, racing cinematography contribute to the material’s propulsive anxiousness. Text messages and phone calls often appear in the same frames as the cast, a decision that not only reinforces director Collet-Serra’s place as one of the few genre filmmakers working today who hasn’t shied away from the visual and narrative possibilities of our current digital age, but also keeps the film’s constant flow of information running at a healthy, brisk pace at all times.

And having guided Liam Neeson through all manner of planes, trains and automobiles, he has no difficulty navigating spectacular set-pieces. But none are more astounding than the single-shot freeway sequence in which LAPD detective Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler) fights her way out of a speeding vehicle.

As Elena and the driver wrestle over a gun as the car smashes against obstacles on either side, all while traveling at 70 miles per hour. Followed closely by a superb shoot out and stalking through the massive baggage handling plant.

Performances wise, Taron Egerton is actually quite good in every man mode. Though, Egerton has done action before in the Kingsman franchise and 2018’s best forgotten Robin Hood, but this one really announces him as a full-blown action hero. It gives him plenty of moments that hearken back to big-screen action blockbusters, such as commandeering an airport vehicle to chase down a plane and running through a very much crowded airport terminal.

However, Jason Bateman, the most non-obvious choice as a villain, is the film’s most stand out element. Anyone who remembers Bateman‘s work for Netflix as Marty Byrde in Ozark is aware that the actor can definitely go to some dark places, but here he brings an unexpectedly likable dimension to the nameless psycho giving orders in Ethan’s ear, much similiar to the control freak voiced by Kiefer Sutherland in Phone Booth (2002).

The rest of the cast also fills their expected roles well. Danielle Deadwyler, feels a little underused, but does little more than potter around the periphery, only rolling her sleeves to take charge in the final act, while Sofia Carson, Dean Norris, Sinqua Walls, Theo Rossi, Logan Marshall-Green, Josh Brener and Curtiss Cook provide solid support. On the whole, ‘Carry-On’ is a fantastic airport thriller that is satisfyingly intense and enjoyable throughout.