Jaume Collet-Serra returns to form even without Liam Neeson in the entertaining Carry-On

Jaume Collet-Serra has finally crawled out from under The Rock. Truth be told, he wasn’t actually in hiding that long; compared to the near-decade he spent setting and perfecting the template for the post-Taken Liam Neeson vehicle, Collet-Serra taking a few years to make effects-heavy Dwayne Johnson movies should have felt like a minor blip. It might have even been a nice refresher course in the business of efficiently exciting crowdpleasers for the megastar in question. Yet the experience of actually watching Jungle Cruise and Black Adam, waiting as they failed to show more than a few glimmers of Collet-Serra’s usual B-movie pizzazz, could feel downright eternal. Not so with Carry-On, Collet-Serra’s latest thriller, his first for Netflix, and a spiritual sequel to his best Neeson movies.

Yes, Collet-Serra is back in travel mode, with a movie set almost entirely at LAX, forging an instant kinship with his plane-set Non-Stop. (It’s also set smack in the middle of the holidays, making it something like A Non-Stop Christmas.) Though Collet-Serra doesn’t write his movies—T.J. Fixman contributes the screenplay this time—he’s clearly attracted to neo-Hitchcockian set-ups like this: Ethan (Taron Egerton), an underachieving TSA employee, receives a mysterious earpiece, from which emanates the even, no-fuss tone of Jason Bateman, playing an unnamed freelancer. (Not a terrorist, he insists.) The voice informs Ethan that he needs to let a certain suspicious carry-on suitcase through security without stopping it. If he flags the suitcase or its owner, his pregnant girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson), who also works at LAX, will be killed. Suspecting that complying will result in disaster but unwilling to outright defy his manipulator, Ethan searches for ways to wriggle away long enough to warn someone about the threat, though the mystery man and his sniper-rifle-wielding associate often appear at least one step ahead of him.

The size of those steps are crucial to the success of a movie like Carry-On. The opposite of the gold standard in this regard is the mostly-forgotten 1996 John Badham thriller Nick Of Time, a real-time exercise where everyman Johnny Depp was repeatedly thwarted by bad guy Christopher Walken simply materializing whenever and wherever he needed to be at any given moment. There are a few points where Bateman’s character almost approaches that level of omniscience here, but at least it’s explicitly aided by technology—and, unofficially, by Bateman’s fine work as the heavily prepared villain who nonetheless talks, well, like a Jason Bateman character, OK, pal? He talks with the slightly icy politeness of a businessman routinely making his way through the airport, which makes the unyielding nature underneath all the more chilling.

If there’s anything lacking from Carry-On compared to the best of Collet-Serra’s past, it’s that inimitable Neeson mix of gravel and gravitas. Egerton is actually quite good in everyman mode as Ethan; he makes a more convincing case of a working-class guy called upon to perform thorny heroism than his Eggsy from the Kingsman pictures. It’s just that the screenplay gets a little mush-mouthed about Ethan’s obligatory personal obstacles and backstory—maybe because on the whole, coasting through an unglamorous yet steady TSA gig while your pregnant partner has a better-paying airline job isn’t necessarily the crisis of ambition, masculinity, and bootstraps that the movie wants it to be. The petty human journeys of Collet-Serra’s thriller characters often work better than they’re given credit for, and that may even be true here. But Egerton’s feckless charm can’t approximate that Neesonian mix of weariness and Catholic guilt (best distilled in his Non-Stop monologue: “I’m not a good father! I’m not a good man! But I’m not hijacking this plane. I’m trying to save it!”).

He does, however, have plenty of opportunities to sprint, sweat, and squirm through Collet-Serra’s machinations, big and small. A canny synthesizer of old-fashioned, close-up screw-tightening and ridiculous spectacle, here the director repeatedly sends characters hurtling through clearly defined spaces, like a chase through the various luggage-carrying conveyer belts or a fight staged entirely within a perilously, cartoonishly careening automobile. (That sequence alone justifies the cuts away from the airport to check in on an investigative subplot featuring Danielle Deadwyler as a Los Angeles cop.) It’s a horror-trained form of Hollywood slickness—the director also made House Of Wax and Orphan—that was once pretty common in mid-sized action movies and serial-killer thrillers. For its recent absence, this digitally juiced-up version looks all the better.

In the final 30 minutes or so, Carry-On does flirt with late-’90s, Bruckheimer-style climax overkill, only without the budget to stage something truly spectacular, and in place of big-ticket action, the villainous switch-ups and emergency back-up plans become a bit convoluted. Still, there’s never a true early-check-out moment of the sort that arrives with such numbing frequency in so many bigger-scale blockbusters; the movie locks in and moves. That should be a sign that Collet-Serra could do even more on a bigger canvas—while his last couple movies before this one suggest that the system may be less receptive to doing more than ever. For now, he may have to settle for making sure the planes, and trains, and mysterious killer orphans continue to run on time.

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Writer: T.J. Fixman
Starring: Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, Sofia Carson, Danielle Deadwyler, Theo Rossi, Logan Marshall-Green
Release date: December 13, 2024 (Netflix)