Around this time every year, people start talking about their favorite holiday films. Inevitably some real jokester says their favorite Christmas movie is Die Hard, har har. Technically, that’s a movie that takes place at the end of December, so it qualifies. Yet the bit has grown stale. Here’s hoping that the new Christmas-set action movie Carry-On (Netflix, December 13) will swiftly enter the canon and take some pressure off of Die Hard. It certainly earns its place in that firmament.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Sera, Carry-On is a simple idea intricately executed. Taron Egerton, erstwhile Elton John impersonator and Kingsman of England, plays a humble TSA officer, Ethan, who becomes a pawn in a nefarious terrorist plot unfolding at LAX on Christmas. He’s connected via bluetooth to a mysterious villain—played with effective offhandedness by Jason Bateman—and told to let a particular bag through security. If he doesn’t, dire things will happen to his pregnant girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson). It’s a tweak on a familiar setup, in which our hero must do bad and risky things in secret to prevent even worse.
Collet-Sera and screenwriter T.J. Fixman have a firm control of that formula as they ratchet up the tension in considered increments. The film is not going for total plausibility, but it is grounded in the logic and physics of the real world. Carry-On is refreshingly old-fashioned in that way; it is more interested in actual human capacity than in what modern technology can fake.
There is one impressive visual sequence here that makes good use of contemporary technique, a bracing scene set inside in a car that evokes a similarly dazzling single-take set piece in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Collet-Sera gives himself a little room to flex in it, showing an admirable investment in what could easily have been mere chum for the algorithm. Carry-On demonstrates that vision and thought need not only be applied to awards-bait movies or, I dunno, Christopher Nolan blockbusters. Here is a movie agreeably small in scale and humble of mission that nonetheless operates like an expensive Swiss watch.
Egerton is a winsome everyman lead, mellowing the rakish charm he employed so effectively in the Kingsman movies and replacing it with a sympathetic, workmanlike decency. His character is frustrated about his career; he’s ambitious but not exactly a go-getter. There’s something sweetly relatable about him, even if his grand wish is to become a cop. Bateman is the calm, almost affably evil counterpart to that earnest moxie, exhibiting a chilling confidence as he cruelly spars with Egerton. It’s a compelling dynamic, turning what could be passive phone conversations into visceral suspense. Chasing after them is an LAPD detective played by Danielle Deadwyler, always a commanding screen presence. She ably contributes to the movie’s air of efficient competence, giving depth to what are mostly expositional lines of dialogue.
These winning performances are in service of a clever script, one that pays close attention to detail and has a sharp internal memory. The movie is careful to give every plot mechanism its just due; even small side characters are not forgotten about. It’s perhaps an indictment of our movie times that a film simply having a firm grasp on its own world should feel so exciting, but the same cannot be said about too many other streaming titles.
Perhaps it’s blinkered nostalgia to think that Carry-On belongs to an older tradition, one in which craft and substance mattered even in little genre stuff like this. There was, of course, plenty of junk made 30 years ago—we tend to remember the good stuff. But Carry-On does still call to mind the action movies of an era past, even with its heavy reliance on smartphones. It’s sturdy, well-shot, and endearingly earnest instead of arch. What a fun night at the movies—or, I guess, at home.
