Carry-On (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2024).
For the past few years, Jaume Collet-Serra has been getting the proverbial bag; with Carry-On, he peers inside it. The film is a thriller set during the holiday crunch at LAX: it centers on Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), a prematurely harried TSA officer (and recent police academy washout) who clocks in for his Christmas Eve shift at the crack of dawn with something to prove.
Specifically, Ethan is hoping to show his skeptical bosses—as well as his newly pregnant girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), herself an airport employee—that he’s finally ready to take his shit-eating gig manning the baggage scanner seriously. “I’ve been coasting,” he admits at a staff meeting. “But I can do better.” No sooner has Ethan taken his post than he’s recruited, against his will and under the noses of his coworkers, to steward a mysterious package through security and onto an outbound flight, where its contents will be detonated to catastrophic effect; it goes without saying that if he tries to alert the authorities, Nora is going to be used for target practice, and that’s just for starters.
The ostensible subject of Carry-On is domestic terrorism, a potentially charged topic to which the screenplay (by former video-game writer T. J. Fixman) adds little beyond convolution. The motives and geopolitical allegiances of the nameless, faceless, and ruthless cipher (Jason Bateman) stage-managing Ethan’s deception through a well-hidden Bluetooth earbud become less compelling the more they are articulated (exposition is provided through LAPD briefings to a dogged detective, played by Danielle Deadwyler, who only enters the fray in the final act). The real tension in the material has to do with point of view. The same digitally enhanced vantage that permits Ethan to dispassionately probe the personal effects (and private lives) of each traveler becomes instrumentalized, along with its operator, into a potential tool of mass murder. Meanwhile, Bateman’s bad guy exults in his access to a sophisticated panoply of cameras and data points, which together make up a mosaic of his mark’s practical and psychological weak spots: surveillance as a form of X-ray vision.
As usual, Collet-Serra prefers his protagonists exposed, vulnerable, and out of their element; his interest lies in the workaday world and the clock-punching types who inhabit it. These inclinations, which found their most potent expression in the rat-race metaphysics of his 2018 film The Commuter (and its amazingly executed, days-go-by prologue), made for a strange fit with the übermenschian anti-heroics of Black Adam (2022), but they serve him well here. Carry-On is two hours long, but it feels like ninety minutes; it’s self-contained in a way that privileges clarity over clutter. For a filmmaker predisposed to patterning and repetition, the airport setting seems a natural habitat, a labyrinth of perpetual motion in which people, objects, and power dynamics keep criss-crossing, a set of interlacing trajectories literalized in a sequence involving a chase across a multi-level, omni-directional conveyor belt.
Carry-On (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2024).
For those who enjoy procedurals made with curiosity and attention to detail, Collet-Serra’s career has come to represent a modest rallying point. Such is the nature of an online film culture that’s been captured by branding on every level, including directorial reputations. The impulse to stake out critical territory is irresistible, especially in the ostensible B-movie trenches, but it’s a fine line between getting in on the ground floor with a potentially interesting filmmaker and contributing, however earnestly, to their gentrification. When does genuine admiration metastasize into performative shtick? As the former bestower of Reverse Shot’s annual, and now discontinued, Jaume Collet-Serra Award for Achievement in Films Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, I have reason to wonder about this myself.
“If something this basic is so easy, how come it’s so rarely done this well?” asked Nick Pinkerton in his own laudatory Reverse Shot blurb on House of Wax in 2005. It was a good question, and Collet-Serra has since leveraged the scarcity of his skill set into a cottage industry. In this context, the director’s ignominious two-film gig as Dwayne Johnson’s in-house contractor becomes recoupable as part of a pilgrim’s progress: the humble (but not vulgar!) auteur, sprung from the belly of the Hollywood beast and, with Carry-On, finally back on form. The story, both onscreen and off, is a good one worth telling (the JCS guarantee), but for all its predictable skill—including smartly calibrated lead performances, with Egerton credibly sweating bullets and Bateman masticating his Malkovichian dialogue along with a bag of Cheetos—Carry-On feels somehow more disposable than its predecessors.
This weightlessness is perhaps in part a byproduct of the film’s algorithmic positioning on Netflix alongside new releases like Hot Frosty (another holiday-themed film whose coda uncannily mirrors Carry-On’s). The explicitly lobotomy-minded mandate of certain streaming giants is well inventoried by Will Tavlin’s recent n+1 essay, “Casual Viewing,” which deconstructs Netflix’s “pyramid scheme for attention.” Even for a filmmaker defined by his willingness to color vividly inside the lines of his assignments, the ostensible liberation of working for a company predicated on content-generation may be deceptive: in trading Disney for Netflix, Collet-Serra hasn’t liberated his practice so much as moved, with requisite speed and agility, between a Rock and a hard place.
Carry-On (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2024).
It may be that “Netflix sheen” is more a rhetorical proposition than an observable cinematographic phenomenon (like pornography, one knows it when they see it). Such a lens, nevertheless, seems to expose Carry-On’s strangely anodyne qualities. These extend beyond Lyle Vincent’s too-bright and slicked-up cinematography, which lacks the grit that Tony Scott’s former confederate Paul Cameron brought to The Commuter and its marvelously sculptural images of a train car swaddled in wet newspaper; it’s telling that the only scene that truly breaks Carry-On’s concentration is an ostentatious CGI-assisted oner set in the front seat of a speeding vehicle. At his best, Collet-Serra throws down without showing off; here, chasing after Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, JCS falls short of his own wicked set piece in Orphan (2009) of a driverless car sliding into traffic with a child strapped in the backseat. Another tell, arguably more self-conscious, about the project’s overall tidiness: Bateman’s character’s habit of dispatching his victims as antiseptically as possible, via a set of paralyzing agents, which anticipates his own fate, squared away safely behind glass like a diabolical Funko Pop, enswirled in his own little cloud of toxicity.
Navigating a private zone of self-interest as an expectant father risking his life for a planeful of strangers, Ethan likewise keeps his hands clean. His moral rectitude is admirable, but it contributes to Carry-On’s lack of friction. In a year when some very smart critics have accused Collet-Serra’s fellow genre specialist (and Netflix stablemate) Jeremy Saulnier of peddling copaganda by styling Rebel Ridge as a kind of harm-reduction-vigilante narrative, Collet-Serra’s own film, which is even less ambiguous, should invite similar scrutiny. The screenplay’s repeated insistence on respect-verging-on-reverence for the TSA’s efforts —underlined by a scene wherein a callow business-class asshole trying to bully Ethan (“does it take a doctorate to read a computer screen?”) is reprimanded by a claque of stern-looking military servicemen—is complicated by the fact that Ethan’s above-and-beyond conduct turns out, in the end, to have been a successful audition for a different uniform, with virtue as its own slightly dubious reward. Here, the desire of both the character and the director is for upward mobility within a flawed but meritocratic system that is, if not beyond reproach, then at least above active subversion; the margin between doing a good job and coasting becomes thin. The badge that our hero plunks down proudly—and, pointedly, in the face of his former terminal-bound colleague, rendered ridiculous by his Santa hat—serves as a witty, if counterintuitive, tribute to the righteous, serve-and-protect metaphysics of Dirty Harry (1971), and a fitting emblem of a movie in thrall, in every way, to the call of duty.