Carry-On (Netflix) - Review

Netflix's airport thriller Carry On is streaming right now, but is it a first-class action movie or the Spirit Airlines of action movies? I'll let you know right now. Hello, everybody, I'm Dan Merl, here with my review of Carry On, which is now streaming around the world on Netflix. Carry On is from Spanish director Jama-Colette Serra, and in the last 13 years, he's made only two movies that didn't star either The Rock or Liam Neeson. And those two movies were The Shallows, which I actually enjoyed, and this movie. And I think that Carry On shows that, as a director, he's much better served when he branches out as far as who his leading man is going to be. Now, I'm often accused of not being able to turn off my brain or enjoy action movies like this, and that's actually not true. With a movie like this, or with any movie, my goal, as a viewer and as a critic, is to meet the movie at its level. What is it trying to achieve? How successfully does it achieve that goal? And that was really the case with this film. Carry On is obviously aiming to be a throwback to the kind of action movie that was popular in the 80s and 90s, and I like a lot of those. It shares a lot of DNA, for example, with Die Hard 2. And I think that on that level, it largely succeeds. Taron Egerton stars as Ethan Kopech, a police academy washout who's now working as a TSA agent at LAX. As the trailer for Die Hard so dramatically put it, it's Christmas Eve in LA. And LAX is swamped with travelers trying to get home for the holidays. Unfortunately, the airport is also being visited by a mysterious traveler, played by Jason Bateman, who slips Ethan an earpiece and says that if he doesn't let a certain bag slip through security, he will kill Ethan's pregnant girlfriend, played by Sophia Carson. To make matters worse, every move that Ethan makes is being watched, and every second counts. Whatever you're trying to sneak through security, it isn't gonna work. Naughty, naughty. They got dogs? Let's cancel the text. Reach down and cancel that text right now. Attaboy. The rest of the movie finds Ethan trying to weigh the security of thousands of people against the safety of the woman he loves and their unborn child, as he's constantly fed instructions that only he can hear. Needless to say, moral dilemmas are faced and impossible choices are made as Ethan tries to figure out how to get out of this situation while under the watchful eye of his tormentors. This is the kind of movie that would not have worked if you put The Rock or Liam Neeson in the lead role, because Ethan is a young character. He's lost. He wanted to be a cop. Now he's stuck being a TSA agent. It's a job that he doesn't really like. Now he has all this responsibility, though, because he's about to be a young father. You need a younger actor in the lead, and I think that Taron Egerton was a really good choice, because the one thing that you have to be able to do in a movie like this is to root for the lead character. This has to be somebody that you like, and he's a very likable actor. He's got an everyman quality, and the tradition of John McClane, and the screenplay throws a lot of wrinkles his way. There are moments where you think maybe he's gonna find a way out, but then that plan is thwarted. It's a strong lead performance from Egerton, and he never plays it with a wink and a nod, and that's the other thing. These movies may be made to be slightly cheesy or to be a lot of fun, but they only work when the actors in them are fully committed. Jason Bateman may seem like an odd choice to play the villain, but he too has to be believable. I mean, this guy has to be somebody who could blend in at an airport bar, the kind of guy who could be sitting next to you in the terminal. He may not be physically imposing, but he's always a threat, and Bateman plays this part with a cold, cruel directness that makes the threat to Ethan, his girlfriend, and the civilians at risk real. He may not have been the obvious choice to play this role, but I think that he was the right one. Because this is a throwback to the sort of classic action movie, part of the buy-in as a viewer is that you're gonna be watching a lot of things that are just utterly ridiculous and unbelievable, even the best action movies have those things in them. And I think that when you're judging a movie like this, what you have to judge it by is not real-world rules of logic. Almost every movie would fail if you put it up to a real-world logic test. What a movie has to pass, in my mind, is whether it can establish its own logic and its own rules, and then play by those rules, and at the same time, not set ground rules that are just way too unbelievable or impossible to believe, even if you decide, you know what, I'm gonna give this movie the benefit of the doubt. I think Carry On does a pretty good job of setting its own rules, rules that allow you to buy in and believe the movie. There are several moments that do come off as far too convenient or contrived or completely unbelievable, but I think it lays down just enough internal logic to keep everything on track. If the script for this movie was, let's say, 25% better, then I think that this really could have been one of the standout action movies in the last handful of years, and another movie that we could have debated every year whether or not it was actually a Christmas movie. It is a Christmas movie, by the way, because of the rules of Die Hard. It takes place on Christmas, there's Christmas music, the stakes are Christmas-related. Yes, this is a Christmas movie. The movie also gets a boost because it's very well-made on a technical level. It's set in LAX on Christmas Eve, and if you're gonna set a movie at LAX, you have to have an airport that looks believable. It can't look like some regional airport or some warehouse that you built out two hallways. You have to get the feeling of these massive terminals, of these huge crowds, and they're able to do that. I've been to LAX many times. If you're gonna sit there and say, well, that's not what the gates look like, yeah, sure, it's not actually LAX, but it passes enough that you're not sitting there thinking that this is a movie that should have been made on a $100 million budget and it looks like a $2 million cheapie. The action's also well-shot and choreographed, and the effects very rarely look cheap. There's actually one brief action sequence featuring Daniel Dedweiler, who plays an LA cop, who's trying to break the case. It reminded me a lot of a Matthew Vaughn action scene in that it was so over the top that as a viewer, you're either gonna think that it's too much and absolutely ridiculous or that it's pretty cool, and for me, it landed on the pretty cool side. The movie also has stakes, personal for Ethan and broader for the innocents at LAX who are threatened with a lethal weapon that pretty much guarantees death. For action movies like this to work, you have to care. You have to care about the characters and the resolution, and I did care, even though I was fully aware that this was playing into a formula that's designed to manipulate the audience and get you to care about it, but that's what movies really do. They manipulate you as an audience member, your emotions, good, sad, happy, any of that. That's what any movie does, so even if you can recognize the conventions and the tropes, again, it's about the execution of those tropes, and I think that Carry On executed them fairly well. Carry On's not a great movie, but I think it's a very enjoyable one. Edgerton and Bateman really center it, and I think that they're both very good in it, and the supporting performances from Deadweiler, Theo Rossi, Dean Norris, and the rest of the cast all hit the right notes. If this was a theatrical release, I'd say it's a pretty good movie, and it's worth the price of admission, but when we're talking about streaming, I think this is easily one of the better streaming movies that I've seen this year. That's one of the problems with all of these streaming services flooding the market with three new movies a week. There's so much to pick through that you never really know from movie to movie what you're dealing with. Is this a theatrical quality studio film, or is this a cheaply made piece of garbage that was dumped to a streamer because nobody else was interested? When you remove the filters and everything just gets thrown out there, it's hard as an audience member to know what exactly to expect. I enjoyed this more than some movies I've seen in theaters this year. For example, Red One hit Amazon Prime Video this week. I would recommend this movie head and shoulders above Red One, and that's a movie that was in theaters, and I think that that's something that the streamers have got to work on is messaging what audiences should expect from their movies, or maybe, and this is a crazy idea, make better streaming movies, because if more movies that were released straight to Netflix or other services were this quality, then I think that streaming movies in general would have a much better reputation. I mentioned the phrase turn off your brain earlier in this review, and it's a phrase that I've always hated, because it's usually thrown at people or critics who didn't like a certain movie, and it's used as an excuse for that movie to be bad. They'll say, well, you know, it's a stupid movie, but you just need to learn to turn off your brain, and then you'll enjoy it, and I think that that's insulting, because I don't think that we should lower the bar because movies themselves refuse to clear a higher bar. No movie should be so dumb that it requires you to disengage your higher thinking skills but not every movie has to be an Oscar-caliber movie either. All it has to do is set its own ground rules and present to you a story in a world where the things that happen in it make enough sense for the movie to make sense and for you to enjoy it, and that's what I did. I enjoyed this movie. There are some eye-roll moments and some places where the plot gets a little too cute and convoluted for its own good, but the movie never goes off the deep end. Carry On may at times annoy your brain, but you can still keep it on, and the movie doesn't insult your intelligence, which is where I start to get angry. So overall, I'm giving Carry On a rating of it's good. If you have a couple of free hours this weekend, I think this is a way better bet than Craven the Hunter or even War of the Rohirrim, the two big releases that hit theaters this weekend. Netflix, make more movies like this. They don't have to be Oscar winners. They just have to be good. So those are my thoughts on Carry On. What do you think? Are you gonna fire up Netflix and check it out? Let me know down in the comments below, and stay tuned right here on the channel. Early next week, I'm gonna have reviews of the two major holiday releases, Mufasa the Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. You can look for those early in the week, as well as box office and some reviews of the awards contenders, plus we're almost at the time for my favorite movies of the year and my least favorite movies of the year as we approach the end of 2024, so lots still to come on the channel. Thank you so much for spending time to watch this review. Until next time, stay safe, and I'll see you then. Bye.