CARRY-ON: Die Harder 2: Die More Harder

Netflix’s new Christmas thriller, Carry-On, makes Die Hard 2: Die Harder look like Die Hard. The film, helmed by Jaume Collet-Serra with a script by T.J. Fixman, is ostensibly a modern riff on that airport-based action movie sequel. The plot follows a TSA agent, Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), who gets blackmailed by a stranger trying to smuggle a dangerous suitcase. While he tries to wriggle out of the situation, thinking on his feet and trying to save his girlfriend (Sofia Carson), the LAPD get involved and the stakes just keep rising — and, just like John McClane 30 years ago, Ethan is somehow the only man who can save the day.

The movie isn’t pussyfooting around — it fully embraces how stupid it is. It starts stupid and just gets stupider as it goes on, until finally I felt like my brain took off the runway and was floating at 30,000 feet, perfectly willing to accept the movie’s idiotic ideas about exploding plastic guns, nerve gas, TSA competency, police protocol, and the lack of attention paid to the “fasten seatbelts” sign on an American plane. It’s stupid from beginning to end, with a stupid title to match. At nearly two hours in length, this thing carries on indeed.

All I Want For Christmas Is To Smuggle Something Past The TSA

Ethan Kopek is an average guy who badly wants to be a cop but is stuck in a dead-end TSA job at LAX. His girlfriend, Nora, is expecting a child, but he doesn’t feel very enthused about being a father. Despite his defined cheekbones and trim Hollywood Leading Man body, Carry-On tells us that this guy is a nobody. And then he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and is forced to go from “nobody” to “somebody” real quick.

A mysterious man who speaks to Ethan over an earpiece wants him to let his colleague through the TSA line with no bag searches, no questions asked. He threatens to kill Ethan’s friends, coworkers, and girlfriend to get him to comply. It might sound simple, but the plot spirals out of control very quickly, and soon Ethan is Tom Cruise-running around the airport and taking matters into his own hands.

For director Collet-Serra, this is nothing new. He helped invent Liam Neeson’s Renaissance of Mad Dad movies in the 2010s as the director of Unknown, The Commuter, Run All Night, and Non-Stop. Collet-Serra is a competent director who knows how to make the action look good. He might not be an auteur of action, but his single-take fistfights show he cares about good blocking and coherent choreography.

Hitchcock For The Holidays

You can tell that Collet-Serra’s approach is trying for an old-school Hitchcock style, akin to Phone Booth or The Guilty. For the sequences where Egerton is screwed into his chair at the baggage scanner, trying to rely on audio cues to triangulate the caller’s position, Carry-On is enjoyable, tense, and a little exciting. But the screenplay doesn’t stay fresh for long, instead relying on knucklehead action scenes, moronic character decisions, and blunt exposition to tell the story.

Some of those action scenes are dramatically interesting conceptually, only to fumble in the execution. The climax, for example, takes place in the checked baggage sorting area, a labyrinth of conveyor belts that Taron Egerton and some other guy ride while they duke it out. But the sequence just isn’t shot with any energy or sense of geography, like the droid factory sequence in Attack of the Clones. My brain knew that stuff was happening — two men were hitting each other and sliding down conveyor belts — but there was no intelligence to the camera angles and no rhythm to the editing. (You can tell this was edited by three different people.) Unaccompanied Minors somehow did this scene better back in 2006.

Much of the script felt like a first draft Fixman wrote while waiting six hours for a layover. That would explain why the scenes outside of the airport feel so disjointed and vacant. They mostly follow Danielle Deadwyler, playing the cop trying to sort this mess out. Her character must be one of the worst detectives ever put to film. She’s introduced to us as she’s texting and driving, and she nearly crashes into a police car. Later, she pulls a gun on her driver in a moving vehicle on the highway. Then they get into a fistfight while their car is still going 80 miles an hour, smashing into anything that gets in their way, and they total about 20 cars and probably kill a dozen people before they finally flip over. It felt like watching Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun, except that Deadwyler has this nutso bug-eyed intensity in every scene that made me scared for everyone around her.

Even if you’re barely paying attention, even if you’re watching this thing completely wasted on, like, your fifth alcoholic eggnog, his movie is just garbage. The explanation about the motives of the villains — not the dude on the phone, mind you, the actual terrorists who hired him — is so sloppy, so rushed, and so half-baked that it blows past you in 20 seconds and has no bearing on the story. And while I applaud any film that takes a more nuanced geopolitical take than just making the Russians or the Chinese the bad guys for the millionth time, Carry-On only ever pays lip service to its secret theme that the real baddies are greedy defense contractors, and the characters still say “the Russians” as though there’s supposed to be a scare cue afterward.

Conclusion

Scene to scene, Carry-On is nonsense. You’ll either spend the film’s third act too high on the movie’s stupidity to care about the plot, or you’ll be shouting at every twist, wondering why, of all people, Taron Egerton’s character has to keep being the one to save the day.

Carry-On hasn’t gotten too bad a reception critically — most critics seem to be willing to give it a pass, holiday spirit and whatnot, saying it’s an entertaining way to waste two hours. But here’s the thing: It’s still a waste of two hours. And with more movies than ever to watch, I’d rather spend that time with a film that’s actually competently written and that respects my intelligence as a viewer. We are not going to be celebrating the guy who made Black Adam as some kind of “they’re still making them like they used to” savior of cinema.

The whole master plan of sneaking something past the TSA doesn’t even make sense. The TSA isn’t that good at their jobs — internal Homeland Security simulations back in 2016 tested if TSA agents could prevent passengers from smuggling hypothetical guns and bombs onto American planes, and the bombs got onto those planes 95 percent of the time. Unless you have a giant, obvious suitcase bomb, a machine gun in your golf club bag, or a bottle of hand sanitizer that’s over 3.4 ounces, Ethan Kopek would probably let you on your flight. Happy holidays.

Carry-On is now streaming on Netflix.