Let’s please, as a gift to me, leave aside the discourse about the Christmas bona fides of Die Hard, and instead turn our attention to a dandy new thriller called Carry-On, a movie that explicitly situates itself as a Christmas movie, and is plenty good fun, to boot.
Ethan is a low-level TSA agent at Los Angeles International Airport, and it’s his first time running that machine that x-rays bags, which is a hefty task on this day in particular, given that’s it’s Christmas Eve, the lines are long, and the travelers are surly. But things get even worse when he finds a small ear piece in a bin, receives a text instructing him to put it in his ear, and a mysterious voice tells him he’s going to see something bad on his x-ray but he has to let the bag through or else his pregnant girlfriend dies.
Not ideal! On Christmas Eve, no less. The movie does good work in building the action slowly, as a lot of the first half takes place more or less at Ethan’s scanning station while he tries to figure out a way out of the situation and the voice thwarts him at every turn, before everything goes wild in the last 45 minutes or so. And yes, of course it’s preposterous and implausible, but a lot of what we see doesn’t feel impossible, which makes a huge difference. The movie is slickly shot and edited to ratchet up the tension, and one scene involving a highway crisis is kind of stunning, even if it doesn’t really relate stylistically to any of the rest of the movie. And the best thing of all is that no one is making wisecracks, which is a crutch that plagues nearly all action movies these days—the situation here is serious, and everyone treats it that way.
There are, of course, plot holes large enough to fly a Dreamliner through, and one involving nearly identical suitcases still baffles me. But these are problems you expect from a movie like this, and if we’d somehow gotten a completely airtight thriller, that would be some kind of Christmas miracle.
Carry-On is on Netflix.
