3 out of 5

Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra

I think Carry-On was my initial dream of streaming service exclusive films. I accept that the media landscape has changed, but I don’t need the super lavishly budgeted IP series and films popping up as new releases on streamers. There’s novelty to that, for sure, but also a bit of “waste:” I’m not here to try to change viewer habits, only to suggest that more moderate budgets can fill home screens just as effectively as gigantic, expensive franchises, and perhaps offering more of this type of middleground – ’cause I think we get a fair amount of cheap and quick alongside the splashier stuff, but not as much inbetween – would result in greater audience satisfaction and engagement. At the very least, I’d be watching more.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra is the king of this kind of stuff. Though he’s been brought into the Disney ring with some flicks, and has a working relationship with A-listers, the consistency of entertainment in his output is impressive. Literally starting from House of Wax, I’ve been impressed by how solid his films are, adding true flair to flicks which could easily have been phoned in – HoW being a great example, coming out in the teen horror remake years – and so seeing his name attached to Netflix original Carry-On certainly peaked my interest. A well cut trailer showing off some very notable Collet-Serra in-your-face action shots sealed the deal.

…Which is not to set aside what the rest of the team brings to things in these movies. Most directly, Collet-Serra gets focused performances from his leads. Perhaps not nuanced, as his films might be dealing with genre tropes, but giving them enough room and time to emote and add weight to a scene while keeping all of that zeroed in on what that scene is meant to accomplish. Taron Egerton, for example, takes the shallowly scripted TSA failed-cop Ethan Kopek and makes him more notable than the everyman type he’s written as; Jason Batemen’s unnamed bad guy follows on his work in Ozark, but it’s cut with mustache-twirling bravado in a way that grounds the increasingly illogical setup at play here.

Namely: “Traveler” (Bateman) needs to sneak an illicit item past airport security and onto a plane. Indirect means put an earpiece into struggling TSA Kopek’s ear, instructing him to let a certain passenger through, lest his pregnant wife (Sofia Carson) get a bullet to the head. This turns the first half of the film into a Phone Booth-esque “don’t leave this spot” type thriller, and T.J. Fixman’s script gets to be at its most playful, here, while Collet-Serra establishes the space of the airport, and Kopek and Traveler snip back and forth, the former testing the latter’s barriers. The second half of the flick are the attempted table-turns by Kopek, and, perhaps predictably, here’s where we start to strain logic moreso, but it’s also when Collet-Serra gets to turn up the visual intensity, leading to some excellently paced action that doesn’t need on-screen choreography to wow us – it’s simply solid, immersive filmmaking.

And just as the overall film may not be anything exactly new, I recognize my review isn’t saying something you haven’t read elsewhere regarding Carry-On. But that’s what lowers our guards about such flicks. These are the kinds of things you’d catch on an afternoon TNT or HBO viewing back in the day, only budgeted at the same level as blockbusters from that era… But setting aside dollars-for-dollars comparisons, the level of craft available to us at somewhat comparable mid-tier levels of flicks is astounding, and makes when you find a great, “have you seen this?” one that much more impressive.