Carry-On is smart, exciting fun

Around this time every year, people start talking about their favorite holiday movies. Inevitably, a real jokester says their favorite Christmas movie is Die Hardhave have Technically, it’s a movie set in late December, so it qualifies. However, the bit has become obsolete. Here’s hoping that the new Christmas-set action movie Hand luggage (Netflix, December 13) will quickly enter the canon and take some pressure off Die Hard. It certainly deserves its place in that firmament.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Sera, Hand luggage is a simple idea intricately executed. Taron Egertonformer Elton John impersonator and Kingsman of England, plays a lowly TSA officer, Ethan, who becomes a pawn in a sinister terrorist plot unfolding at LAX this Christmas. He is connected via bluetooth to a mysterious villain – played with an effective offhandedness by Jason Bateman-and asked to let a certain bag go through security. If he doesn’t, terrible things will happen to his pregnant girlfriend, Nora (Sophia Carson). It’s a tweak on a familiar setup where our hero has to do bad and risky things in secret to prevent even worse.

Collet-Sera and screenwriter TJ Fixman have firm control over that formula as they turn up the tension in considered increments. The film does not go for total plausibility, but it is grounded in real-world logic and physics. Hand luggage is refreshingly old-fashioned that way; it is more interested in actual human capacity than in what modern technology can fake.

There’s an impressive visual sequence here that makes good use of modern technology, a bracing scene set inside a car that evokes a similarly dazzling single-shot scene in Alfonso Cuarón‘s Children of men. Collet-Sera gives himself some wiggle room, showing an admirable investment in what could easily have been just a friend to the algorithm. Hand luggage demonstrates that vision and thought should not only be applied to award-bait films, or I don’t know, Christopher Nolan blockbusters. Here’s a film pleasantly small in scale and humble in mission that nonetheless works like an expensive Swiss watch.

Egerton is a magnificent lead for all people, which tempers the sheer charm he used so effectively in it Kingsman film and replace it with a sympathetic, artisanal decency. His character is frustrated with his career; he is ambitious, but not exactly a goalie. There is something sweetly relatable about him, even though his great desire is to become a policeman. Bateman is the calm, almost lovable evil counterpart to the serious moxie, displaying a chilling confidence as he cruelly spars with Egerton. It’s a compelling dynamic that turns what could be passive phone conversations into visceral excitement. In pursuit of them, an LAPD detective is played Danielle Deadwyleralways a commanding screen presence. She ably contributes to the film’s air of efficient competence and lends depth to what are mostly expository lines of dialogue.

These winning performances are in the service of a smart script, one that pays close attention to detail and has a sharp internal memory. The film is careful to give each plot device its due; even small supporting characters are not forgotten. It’s perhaps an indictment of our movie times that a film that simply has a firm grip on its own world should feel so exciting, but the same can’t be said for too many other streaming titles.

Maybe it’s winking nostalgia to think about it Hand luggage belongs to an older tradition where craft and substance were important even in small genre things like this. Of course, there was a lot of junk made 30 years ago – we tend to remember the good stuff. But Hand luggage still reminiscent of the action movies of an era, even with its heavy reliance on smartphones. It’s robust, well-shot, and endearingly serious instead of arch. What a fun night at the cinema – or, I guess, at home.