After months of morose awards season fare, there’s something so refreshing about the refined simplicity of the Netflix original “Carry-On.” Remember when Hollywood used to churn out single-setting action thrillers like a machine, often referred to by the shorthand “Die Hard on a ____” movies? They often led to guilty pleasures, but also legitimately well-made action flicks like “Air Force One” (on a plane), “Speed” (on a bus), or “Under Siege” (on a ship). I’m not saying the latest from Jaume Collet-Serra stands next to those, but it’s so refreshingly no-nonsense that it’s bound to recall an era when Hollywood movies were less weighed down by mythology or multiverses. It’s a bit too long and a lot too silly, but most people won’t care. And in a year with almost no even-modestly-good holiday offerings (sorry to the two “Red One” fans), this might be the best Christmas movie of the year. (Discuss amongst yourselves if that gives it another connection to “Die Hard” or not.)
“Carry-On” stars an effective Taron Egerton as a TSA Agent named Ethan Kopek, who becomes a key player in a terrorist plot. After a too-long bit in which we meet Ethan’s girlfriend Nora (Sofie Carson), who also works at the airport (of course), and discover that they’re about to have a child, we join Ethan on one of the biggest travel days of the year: Christmas Eve. At his job at a crowded security check-in, he gets handed an earpiece and receives a text ordering him to put it in. A stranger (Jason Bateman) instructs him that he will follow instructions or Nora will die. All he has to do is let a bag through the X-ray machine without raising a red flag. It’s that simple. She’ll live if he looks the other way. Although he knows that means hundreds of others will die.
The script by T.J. Fixman hinges on such a smart concept that it elevates so much of “Carry-On” over its bumpy patches. It’s a classic “What would you do” scenario, a variation on The Trolley Problem really: Would you do something that got your partner, the mother of your child, killed if it meant saving hundreds of innocent lives? At first, Egerton, who can be such a charismatic actor in the right material, felt wrong. Still, he’s consciously choosing to go understated, to let the action around him and the more exaggerated performances do the talking. It’s another sure-to-be underrated turn in the career of a remarkably consistent performer.
And talk they do. In a black coat and hat, Bateman makes a meal out of his villain role. I’d love to see him in more parts like this, exactly knowing the assignment and delivering it menacingly without being overly showy. Collet-Serra fills out the ensemble with excellent character actors, including Logan Marshall-Green, Theo Rossi, Dean Norris, and a fantastic turn from Danielle Deadwyler as the agent who starts putting all the pieces together. Does she do so in a way that radically challenges logical thinking? Of course. But we’ve become a culture that obsesses a bit too much about that kind of narrative nitpicking through reaches for social clout. The truth is that almost all of the best action movies push logic to the side a few times to get the job done, and Deadwyler does some truly heavy lifting to hold some of the more extreme aspects of the film together. (No more so than in an insane action scene set to “Last Christmas” that had me laughing and gasping in equal measure.)
Collet-Serra has proven he can do this kind of no-nonsense action before in several of the better Liam Neeson films (“Run All Night,” “The Commuter”) and the thoroughly enjoyable “The Shallows.” He got distracted by franchises for a bit there with depressing misfires like “Jungle Cruise” and “Black Adam,” but he is fully back in his wheelhouse with “Carry-On,” a concept that serves as a showcase for his ability pace a film like this one. It’s not just a bleak awards season that makes “Carry-On” refreshing but an action movie marketplace that doesn’t understand how much audiences crave a simple plot that’s well done. We were all exhausted by the “Die Hard” rip-offs in the ’90s and ‘00s. But maybe it’s time to let them board the cultural plane again.
On Netflix now.
