‘Carry-On’ is cool, but the two 2000s thrillers it’s inspired by are better

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You don’t walk into a Jaume Collet-Sera thriller expecting a reinvented or even slightly innovative wheel. He’s a B-movie maestro, with the ability to make a brand new movie feel like it’s something you’ve half-seen on TNT a dozen times already. (Though I sincerely, sincerely want to ride for House of Wax and The Shallows(Arguments for another column, perhaps.) Most of his movies feature an increasingly pissed-off Liam Neeson in the middle of some crazy scenario — assassination plot on a transit flight, “reverse amnesia,” etc. – taken to and then beyond its logical extension for peak, controlled ridiculousness. After a few snoozefests in RockLand that I didn’t even bother to watch, JCS is back in its bag with a new muse in Taron Egerton and a new What If: Suppose a TSA agent was threatened into letting something really bad through the security?

Taron is no Liam, but Hand luggage is nevertheless pretty solid – the three-star-out-of-five movie it was born to be, to adopt the Letterboxd rating scale here. But it wasn’t long before both the core concept and setting made me think of the other, better movies it reminded me of. Aside from a scant handful of tense personal faceoffs, the film pits Egerton’s would-be heroic LAX TSA officer, Ethan, against Jason Bateman’s fiendish villain—unnamed throughout the film and credited only as The Traveler—via an earlobe. With the help of an off-site evil tech henchman with access to the airport’s cameras and Google, The Traveler is inside Ethan’s head, literally and figuratively: he can see Ethan’s every move and has enough information to psychoanalyze him and hopefully manipulate him into make your bid. And Ethan, in a professional rut made even more pronounced by the news that he’s going to be a father, feels particularly insecure. There are stretches where the Traveler’s search for Ethan—about his station in life, his lack of a start, his shortcomings as a partner—makes this hostage situation feel more like a harsh therapy session.

Shades of Securitywhich in between the assassinations is really just a bromance dramedy. (Of all the indelibly classic scenes in that movie are last in the cab still hits hardest: “What the hell are you still doing driving a taxi?”) But comparing a Netflix thriller to one of the best movies ever made is unfair. What Hand luggage really took me back to were two early-aughts films that both serve as showcases for how truly insane that era was when it came to letting auteurs cook with ridiculous premises. A terrorist working within the confines of an airport/airplane to carry out a political agenda for shady clients? That’s all Red EyeThe 2005 Wes Craven film that stars Rachel McAdams in the economy seat from Hell alongside Cillian Murphy. And a homicidal maniac inserted himself into his victim’s ear for the duration of the movie? It has the DNA of a film from three years earlier in the extreme 2002 Telephone boothone of the nuttier star vehicles of this century.

It’s not even that they’re much better movies – all three are ridiculous in their own way, both in terms of laughs and laughs – but respectfully, it’s hard to Hand luggage crew to formidably box with Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland and Joel Schumacher or McAdams, Murphy and Wes Craven. Both movies have log lines that would be Rod Serling’s wet dreams and unlike Hand luggage sloppy two-hour drive time, don’t overstay their welcome, get in and out in about 80 minutes.