‘Carry-On’ Review: Flight, Camera, Action

Jaume Collet-Serra, the master of the mass transit thriller, heads back to the airport for the first time in a decade with Carry-On, which trades Non-Stop’s midair mystery for a tour through the nightmare of Los Angeles International Airport security during the Christmas rush. As TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) settles in for a shift scanning bags as an arms smuggler (Jason Bateman) attempts to get a hot package through the line. No sooner does Ethan put in his earpiece than the smuggler’s voice comes through a hacked channel, telling the agent to make sure the package is cleared without issue—or else.

The film is as fiercely economical as Collet-Serra’s best work, namely The Shallows. It wastes little time telling you everything you need to know about Ethan within minutes: Expecting his first child with his partner Nora (Sofia Carson), the man expresses anxiety about not being able to provide for them, even as his lack of ambition keeps him at the entry level of a job he once expected to use to leapfrog to the police force and toward a higher salary and better benefits. To his co-workers, Ethan may as well be a new hire for all the initiative he shows, and even when he begs his boss, Phil (Dean Norris), for a chance at something bigger, it comes in the form of something as modest as his manning one of the airport’s bag scanners for the first time.

Bateman’s smuggler and his watcher (Theo Rossi) have hacked into LAX’s surveillance cameras, and much of Carry-On unfurls from the oppressive high-angle overwatch of the very tools meant to catch people like the arms dealer. Even when the image cuts to a ground-level perspective independent of the security cameras, Ethan always feels like the one being watched. Medium close-ups of our hapless protagonist from numerous angles are assembled in rapid montages to convey his paranoia that the man in his earpiece is clearly nearby. POV shots from Ethan’s perspective dart around the area as our hapless protagonist tries to find his tormentor, and subtly we get hints that Ethan isn’t as useless as he initially seems.

Similar to the heroes of Collet-Serra’s other thrillers set in a closed system, Ethan attempts to let others in on what’s happening, but the video and audio tabs that are kept on him at all times prevent him from doing so. Like an animal attempting to escape a trap that only draws the snare tighter, Ethan invites suspicion as he’s stymied at every turn. This is a thriller where the hero makes consistently smart decisions and even continues to come up with increasingly clever ideas to thwart the bad guy’s plan, it’s just that the bad guys are always one step ahead of him.

Egerton conveys the competence and smarts hidden behind Ethan’s seemingly unimpressive exterior as less a twist than the result of finally being catalyzed out of complacency. And despite the scant screen time between them, Egerton and Bateman work up a thrilling chemistry through their characters’ jibing, particularly as Ethan gains confidence in resisting the smuggler as the latter starts to see his smug, calm sense of authority erode into erratic fury. The pair even share moments of mordant buddy comedy as the dealer eavesdrops on conversations between Ethan and Nora, who works at LAX as a ticketing agent, and offers mocking relationship advice.

But the star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics. And with its hokey Yuletide setting for window dressing, the film is primed to take position with the likes of Die Hard and Batman Returns as Christmas counterprogramming for years to come.