‘Carry-On’: Take off your shoes, pour some liquid for an exciting TSA thriller

The tight-knit and thoroughly entertaining Netflix holiday thriller “Carry-On” had a reported budget of around $47 million, about a quarter of what it cost to make the bloated and star-studded and instantly forgettable likes of Netflix mega-movies “Red Notice ” and “The Gray Man” and maybe there is a lesson here and maybe not.

I’ll take four movies like “Carry-On” over another “Red Notice” any day. Give me a taut, crisply written, well-acted, character-driven suspense story over another impressively mounted but low-calorie international thriller with superstars shaking and spinning their way through a low-stakes story filled with CGI and swooshing drone shots.

Not that I’m saying “Carry-On” will dazzle you with its creativity. It’s more like a mix of similar films in the genre:

• With the action taking place on Christmas Eve and the airport as the primary setting for a game of cat and mouse between a guy with a badge but limited authority who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and a terrorist who threatens to kill hundreds if his demands are not met, it is reminiscent of “Die Hard 2” from 1990.
• The story is filled with tense and ongoing conversations between earlobe-wearing TSA officer Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) and a twisted brain (played by Jason Bateman) on the other end of the line who plays mind games with Ethan, ridiculing him for missing the courage to try to do something on his own, and threatens to kill Ethan or anyone close to him if he doesn’t follow orders. Much like the setting of the 2002 psychological thriller “Phone Booth.”
• Certain elements (which we won’t divulge) in “Carry-On” reminded me of the 2005 Cillian Murphy-Rachel McAdams film “Red Eye.”

The opening sequence of “Carry-On” even has a bit of a “Lethal Weapon” vibe, with the same Los Angeles setting but Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on the soundtrack instead of Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock .” As was the case with “Lethal Weapon,” there is a mysterious and violent episode, and then we go to a scene of domestic bliss and celebration.Ethan and his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson), director of airport operations for the fictional Northwind Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport, have just learned they are having a baby.The happy couple will even be riding to work together as they are both on duty this Christmas Eve.

Inspired by Nora to take some initiative and not just ride the job, Ethan lobbies his supervisor, Senior TSO Phil Sarkowski (a perfectly cast Dean Norris), for a promotion, and Sarkowski reluctantly agrees to give Ethan a ride “on the machine, ” i.e. monitoring the X-ray scanner for all the carry-ons Ethan has just settled in for the long day when a passenger hands him an earwig she found in a bin later, Ethan receives text messages from a restricted number instructing him to put the device in his right ear — and that puts him in touch with the Traveler (Jason Bateman), who says, “Ethan, today is a day you takes off. to remember for a very long time, but if you handle it right, you will have a chance to forget it. One bag, for one life. That’s the deal, that’s what’s going to happen.”

Traveler assigns Ethan a simple task: one of his colleagues will walk through Ethan’s station in a few moments with a suitcase containing something that will be marked by the scanner. All Ethan has to do is… nothing. If he lets the passenger through, no one gets hurt. If he doesn’t, if he tries to contact someone on his phone or signal to a colleague in any way, people will die.

That’s your movie right there. At first we wonder why Traveler wouldn’t just transport this bag in a vehicle, but the script by TJ Fixman eventually addresses this issue in a plausible way. As Ethan and the Traveler engage in psychological and even physical warfare, we follow the parallel intrigues of Theo Rossi’s Watcher, a tech expert and sniper who at one point trains a laser square on Nora’s forehead, and Danielle Deadwyler’s LA cop Elena Cole, who has the familiar role of That One Cop Who Believes the Threat is Real.

As you might expect, some of the plot developments stretch credulity as the body count starts to pile up. Still, director Jaume Collet-Serra (“Black Adam,” “Jungle Cruise”) does a fine job of managing the balance between exposition and action sequences, while the TSA’s behind-the-scenes machinations come across as authentic, and Taron Egerton makes for a likable regular guy , who can also run through airports and pull off some genius moves against the obnoxious traveler. “Carry-On” is a sharp little thriller with some big and satisfying payoffs.