Taron Egerton is dragged into a festive terror plot in Netflix thriller, Carry-On. We’ve written a review.
When a thriller sticks rigidly to formula, the difference between edge-of-your-seat brilliance and boredom largely depends on style, pacing and attention to detail. Just as an age-old joke can still raise a laugh if it’s delivered well, a genre film with a familiar premise can still grab you if it’s served up with enough energy and verve.
All of which brings us to Carry-On. It’s a suspense thriller directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, a French director who’s spent much of his career making passable genre vehicles for Liam Neeson – Unknown, Non-Stop, The Commuter and the like. With a quick rewrite, Carry-On could also feasibly have starred Neeson, given that it’s the story of an ordinary chap – in this case airport security worker Ethan Kopek – who’s confronted by a devilish terror plot one Christmas. It isn’t hard to imagine Neeson running around Los Angeles airport trying to save the day.
Instead, Kopek’s played by the much younger Taron Egerton, whose character is at something of a crossroads in life: aged 30, he’s reluctantly set aside his ambition of becoming a cop and instead faces imminent fatherhood, with his partner Nora (Sofia Carson) pregnant with their first child. Nora also happens to work at LAX, having recently landed a management role; Kopek, by contrast, is coasting through a blue-collar security gig.
Amid the rush of travellers boarding flights over the festive season, Kopek finds himself on screening duty, watching a monitor as items of luggage pass through an X-ray machine. Then a mysterious stranger hands Kopek an earpiece, which he reluctantly places in his shell-like. An ominously smooth voice (belonging to Jason Bateman) tells him, in no uncertain terms, that he has to let a particular bit of carry-on luggage roll through the scanner without raising the alarm.
“All you have to do is nothing,” the villain says.
Will Kopek meekly do as he’s asked, or will he step up and become the hero LAX needs? You can probably guess the answer to that question. In fact, you can probably guess just about every turn Carry-On – written by TJ Fixman and an uncredited Michael Green – will take before it happens. This is partly because it sticks rigidly to genre convention, but also because Collet-Serra and his collaborators rather self-defeatingly reveal certain details about ten minutes too early. The contents of Jason Bateman’s bag, for example, is given away in an opening prologue sequence, meaning we’re several scenes ahead of Kopek before we’ve even met the bloke.
With its confined setting and Christmas trimmings, Carry-On’s obvious genre reference point is the Die Hard franchise, though its slack pacing means that even Renny Harlin’s workmanlike yet enjoyable Die Hard 2 looks like a masterpiece by comparison. Style’s part of the issue here; Carry-On’s unique selling point is that it’s set during a frantically busy time of the year, yet the film’s version of LAX (it was actually shot in New Orleans) seems remarkably sedate. There are clusters of extras dotted about, but the atmosphere’s hardly febrile; bad behaviour is largely confined to a single, well-heeled traveller grumbling about poor customer service and some out-of-focus day players throwing up their hands in frustration.
It’s a marked contrast from, say, the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, a film so dripping in chaos and tension that it felt like being trapped inside someone else’s anxiety attack. Collet-Serra, meanwhile, continues the slick, Tony Scott-lite style he brought to his earlier thrillers, and Carry-On could almost be considered a close relative of similar transport-based films like Non-Stop (Neeson on a plane) and The Commuter (Neeson on a train).
Although lacking Neeson’s seasoned gravitas, Egerton’s perfectly fine as the lead here, and so’s the supporting cast. Bateman’s serviceable, though somewhat lacking menace. There’s also Dean Norris as Egerton’s grouchy boss; Danielle Deadwyler as a cop on the trail of Bateman’s bad guy; and a bespectacled villain played by Theo Rossi, who spends much of the film in the back of a van.
The problem for all of them, again, comes down to approach: everything in Carry-On is almost eerily clean and polished. Egerton’s given a precise, seemingly freeze-dried Roger Moore hairstyle that never changes even as the plot conspires to turn him into a sweating wreck; similarly, his shirt is crisply ironed and so blue it almost seems to glow. It all adds to the film’s uncanny valley quality, which only increases as events become more implausible; there aren’t many action sequences in Carry-On, but the handful we’re given look as though they’ve been speeded up like an old Benny Hill sketch.
The filmmakers’ defence, seemingly, is that Carry-On is meant to be a bit of fun – a festive thriller that people can sit and enjoy together on the sofa one dark, dank Christmas evening. This defence might hold were it not for the contents of the bag; given its connection to real-world events – and real-world deaths – its inclusion could be regarded as bad taste. And that’s before we get to the end, which (no spoilers) is simultaneously risibly absurd and disappointingly flat. That’s quite an achievement when you really think about it.
Unlike Jeremy Saulnier’s superb Rebel Ridge, which bucked Netflix’s batting average somewhat, Carry-On joins the streaming giant’s ever-growing list of ho-hum thrillers. Will it be popular enough with subscribers to warrant a sequel? If so, expect to see Taron Egerton return to a small screen near you soon with Carry On Sergeant or maybe Carry On Camping.
Carry-On is streaming on Netflix now.
