Carry-On (2024)

Yeah, we probably should have gotten around to this last year when it was relevant, but trying to prioritize the seemingly infinite number of streaming holiday movies is an exercise in futility. By the end of last year it became clear Carry-On was something of a hit, at least to whatever extent that term means for streaming, so... well... here it is now.

Cutting to the chase, I liked this one despite a plethora of pretty serious issues. It's the sort of movie that has dozens of things wrong with it but a handful of strengths redeem the experience. In this case, those strengths mostly boil down to Jason Bateman and Danielle Deadwyler elevating this from a tedious unnecessary throwback to '90s suspense flicks to... well... a pretty entertaining unnecessary throwback to '90s suspense flicks.

The premise focuses on a TSA employee who dreams of being a cop getting targeted and blackmailed by powerful forces who are attempting to get a chemical weapon onto a airplane on Christmas Eve. There's not a lot of action - this is mostly suspense - and the bulk of the movie rests on Ethan (the protagonist, played by Taron Egerton) listening to an unnamed traveler (that'd be Bateman, literally credited as "Traveler") speaking into his ear. While the Traveler eventually shows up and interacts with Ethan in person, Bateman's role is largely offscreen voice acting, which makes his impact all the more impressive.

Deadwyler plays an LA police detective closing in on this plot from another angle. She's not given much to work with, but she's the kind of actor who can elevate damn near anything. Sofia Carson plays Nora, Ethan's girlfriend. The movie desperately tries to avoid having her fall into the "damsel in distress" role, with limited success. Visually, the character's framed in ways oddly reminiscent of Megan Fox in various Michael Bay productions, to the point it may have been intended as a reference.

There are a lot of shots that feel like empty references to various action films and more famous filmmakers. I'm not sure if this was a case where director Jaume Collet-Serra was trying to pepper Carry-On with homages to shots he loved, or if he was just copying various styles in the hopes of evoking the tone, tension, or excitement those films achieved. Either way, it comes off as awkward.

Side note: Collet-Serra also directed Run All Night, another Christmas action/suspense flick. For what it's worth, Carry-On is a big improvement. It's also a lot better than his last movie, Black Adam. But what isn't?

At any rate, Carry-On is in a micro-genre of suspense movies where the hero's being forced to essentially work for the antagonist. If you've seen one of these before, you know how this is going to play out. It's just a matter of waiting for our everyman hero to find a way to turn the tables on the bad guys and stop them from both killing their hostage and staging whatever terrorist attack/assassination the plot is centered on. Anyone remember the 1995 movie, Nick of Time? I actually don't (at least not well), but I'm pretty sure it was using basically the same formula, which was already borrowed from Hitchcock.

Keeping with the yuletide tradition, there's also the 1961 Hammer film, Cash on Demand, which was based on a similar premise, albeit with lower stakes and a more meaningful connection to the holidays. Both are driven by charismatic villains, though Cash on Demand's protagonist has something Ethan lacks: an interesting arc. While Cash on Demand has its hero undergo a transformation from Scrooge analog to... well... post-visitation Scrooge analog (seriously, that movie is the missing link between A Christmas Carol and Die Hard), Carry-On just has the hero learn to believe in himself and be more proactive. It's nowhere near as interesting or compelling.

Ethan is probably the movie's biggest problem, and some of that comes down to casting. Egerton isn't bad in the part, so much as wrong in ways that kind of break the movie. Keep in mind this is about a TSA agent who dreams of becoming a cop (an ambition which, spoiler alert, is realized at the end). Setting aside the optics of putting that in a movie in the 2020s, his casting works against the "everyman" side of the character required to sell this to audiences.

I suspect the role was written with someone a bit more average in mind. In fact, I think maybe the whole script was written with a different tone. The focus on TSA agents, several of whom are off-beat, makes me think there was originally going to be more of a comedy slant to this whole thing. You can imagine this with the lead performers flipped, and the script makes much more sense. Egerton looks like an action hero, so his aspirations of becoming a cop feel... well... both suspicious and a little pathetic. We're long past the point where our initial association with law enforcement is "public servant."

Swap Egerton out with someone less fit and conventionally attractive, and his desire to prove himself (while still kind of pathetic) at least becomes relatable. It also would have removed the dissonance created by an athletic action hero with innate detective powers aiming no higher than the LAPD, as opposed to joining the FBI or doing counter-terrorism for the CIA or Homeland Security or something. The movie hinges on Ethan quickly and effectively deducing various elements of the plot - he's supposed to be extremely talented. Why is "cop" the extent of his ambition?

Though I suppose if he'd wanted to join one of those agencies it would have been an issue that they turned out to be the bad guys (or at least some vague cabal of US intelligence operatives was behind all this). The reveal is supposed to carry some weight - they're out to kill a Congresswoman who they're allied with in order to blame Russia and increase their funding. Which, from a political perspective, is a mess of weird, conflicting messages. More importantly, by the time we learn all that, we don't give a damn: the movie is about Ethan and the Traveler. The motivations driving the conspiracy are incidental. The explanation is needlessly complicated noise.

If there's a real twist, it's that the courier carrying the chemical bomb is in the same boat as Ethan (his husband is being held hostage outside in a van controlled by the Traveler's partner), and the two briefly team-up... at least until the courier is ordered to kill Ethan. The courier ends up dying as a result (his plastic gun misfires), though his husband actually breaks free and manages to save Ethan's girlfriend. There's way more emotional gravitas in this minor subplot than the movie wrings out of Ethan's relationship with his girlfriend, who spends most of the movie angry he's not talking to her (he's not talking to her because there's a guy telling him via an earpiece a sniper will murder her if he does).

All this winds up with Ethan fighting the Traveler in the baggage compartment of the plane. Ethan manages to seal him in a refrigerated compartment with the poisonous gas, which we're informed is significantly more than lethal than the VX gas used in The Rock (the 1996 film, not the star of Jaume Collet-Serra's two previous movies). Then in a post-credit scene set a year later we learn Ethan, his girlfriend, and their newborn baby (did I mention Ethan's girlfriend was pregnant?) are on their way to Tahiti (did I mention they wanted to go to - never mind). And also that Ethan is a cop now. Yay?

Bateman's performance is more or less what redeems this. The Traveler is compelling, likeable, and threatening. He manages to come off as frightening while also demonstrating why his targets would believe his assurances that they'll be all right if they follow his instructions. Bateman approaches the character like a modern reinterpretation of Lucifer: he's a trickster who knows how to leverage the truth to sell a lie.

The writing for the Traveler is likewise a step above that for the rest of the movie. It's clear this was where everyone was the most inspired, and everything about him shines through the finished project.

I mentioned Deadwyler already as another of the movie's assets. Unfortunately, the writing around her character wasn't elevated the way Bateman's traveler's was. However, she does get the movie's one memorable fight - a frantic battle inside a speeding car in which her and her opponent are both buckled in. Despite being an effects-heavy sequence, it's exhilarating and a great deal of fun. It's almost reminiscent of the staging in the first two Kingsmen movies, though I might just be thinking that due to Egerton's presence.

I don't really think there's much depth to the movie's Christmas Eve setting. The manufactured tension between Ethan and his girlfriend never rises to the level of John McClane's dark moments of regret leading to an emotional reunion tying Die Hard to classic Christmas romances. Likewise, the movie is set during Christmas Eve day, so there's no connection to the Solstice. You could almost force some sort of link between his girlfriend's pregnancy and the birth of Christ thing, but I really don't think there's much there, either.

So why set this at Christmas? As far as I can tell, it's a combination of using the busiest, most stressful time for the TSA, and a simple, cynical gamble that something set at Christmas would have a better chance of attracting attention (a gamble that seems to have paid off, if stories of this becoming one of Netflix's most streamed movies of all time are true). That second factor certainly makes sense with the movie's use of holiday needle drops: the same tired Christmas songs films like this have been playing for decades are used here in profoundly unoriginal and uninteresting contexts.

This seems like a good point to remind you (and to remind myself) that I still really liked this.

How about a couple more positive aspects before we go, so we're not ending on a sour note. While you can't ignore the movie's decision to kill off one of its gay characters, it's worth stating that the decision to make the secondary couple gay was both interesting and well constructed. We'd actually been following the courier's husband from almost the start without knowing who he was or why the villains were bringing him along. When he turns the table on his captor, it makes for a satisfying reversal.

I also appreciate that Ethan's girlfriend is pregnant, they're in a long-term relationship, and the movie doesn't feel a need to worry about them not being married - hell, I don't even think it comes up. They talk about trips to Tahiti, their excitement about being pregnant, and even bicker playfully about the possibility of getting a dog, but getting married doesn't seem to be a priority. I checked and they're not wearing rings in the epilogue set a year later. It's refreshing to see a movie embrace relationships that don't conform to default assumptions around what people should want.

It's interesting that this caught on to the extent it has. I'm sure Netflix pushing it via their algorithm was a factor, but I don't think that alone can account for it becoming one of their most streamed movies of all time (assuming that's actually true - metrics for these things tend to get fuzzy). The movie fails in numerous areas but succeeds right where it needs to, managing to deliver a tense thriller anchored by a fascinating villain. I assume we'll be seeing more holiday action/suspense films streaming in the next few years as a result.  

While the scales tip in its favor, I don't think this one's going to linger in the public consciousness. Even setting aside the uphill climb streaming movies face after their initial release, the absence of meaningful holiday connections preclude it from becoming a Christmas staple. And while Jason Bateman is great here, a good villain isn't enough for this to break into the pantheon of classic action or suspense movies.

Still, it makes for a solid watching experience. If you skipped it last year, you could do worse with a couple hours than giving it a shot now.