| Carry-On is like Trap. But instead of a concert stadium, it’s an airport; and instead of a serial killer, it’s a professional network of criminals turning a whole bunch of everyday people into killers; and instead of Lady Raven’s music, it’s Christmas music. While I do think there is a rather large audience for action/thriller Christmas movies, that audience does not include me. | | 2024
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
Screenplay by: T.J. Fixman, Michael Green
Starring: Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman
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The point of the Christmas Eve setting for Carry-On is that there are twice as many people flying as compared to any other day, so more chaos at LAX, more opportunities for criminals to slip by unnoticed and more innocent bystanders to be murdered or have their lives ruined just for the fun of it.
Ethan (Taron Egerton) is a low-level TSA agent who doesn’t really care about his job so he just coasts by with the bare minimum, but when his girlfriend announces she’s pregnant, he asks for a raise at work and gets promoted to a bag check machine. A criminal (Jason Bateman) has dropped an ear-piece into a bin, it unrealistically gets handed to Ethan who receives an anonymous text message to put it in his ear and so he does.
The first two acts of the movie is Jason Bateman talking to him, threatening him, convincing him to let a bag through, that all he really has to do is nothing, but of course things don’t go smoothly, and he constantly has to break laws and put other people’s lives and jobs at risk in order to keep the criminals happy. The last third of the movie is all out action, with multiple gun fights in baggage carousels and loading areas, and defusing of bombs on a plane while it’s taking off.
As is common knowledge, police are really nice and thoughtful people who do not shoot first and will believe you if you say you’re innocent while standing over dead bodies with a gun, and then they’ll give you complete authority to do whatever is necessary in order to stop the real bad guys. In case you didn’t catch it, that was sarcasm. In the real world, that ear-piece gets left in the bottom of a baggage bin and goes through the security circuit multiple times before it ever gets into a TSA agent’s ear; I’m certainly not touching it. If it does get to the TSA agent who is then under the criminal’s thumb, he will be shot dead by the cops the minute they appear on the scene.
One of these days Taron Egerton is going to have a really good role in a really good movie that people will actually see and acknowledge (Rocketman doesn’t fit the acknowledged part, Tetris doesn’t fit the people will see it part, and Carry-On doesn’t fit the first two parts); he's a good actor. I’m sure Jason Bateman enjoyed playing the smooth-talking bad guy for a change. But I just found this movie is lacking so much – interest, common sense, reality, etc. The disparate Christmas music playing while criminals are at work does add a fun juxtaposition, so I do like the setting, and I still think there will be a big audience for this movie.
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