“A young airline security guard is blackmailed by a mysterious passenger who threatens to smuggle a dangerous package onto a plane on Christmas Eve.”
SCORE: 7/10
tl,dr: The streaming era’s take on Die Hard (it’s a Christmas movie), that will keep you entertained for 2 hours….and you’ll forget you even watched it by Easter
#1 on Netflix for a few weeks running, Carry-On is a new age Die Hard, except instead of badass John McClain saving an LA skyscraper its…a TSA agent? Hol’ up. Taron Egerton stars in the leading role of Paul Blart (Ethan Kopek), a TSA agent going nowhere in life (as opposed to TSA agents that are going somewhere in life?). His fiancée, Nora (Sofia Carson), has been trying to motivate his bum-ass and also works in the airport as a bag check lady or something. He finally grabs the bull by the horn on Christmas Eve, and finagles his way to the big leagues – that’s right – the x-ray machine. No longer will he be getting erotic satisfaction from patting down middle aged overweight travelers groins, forcing people to throw out nalgenes that have 4.3 oz of water in them, or berating elderly women who haven’t travelled in 15 years that LAPTOPS COME OUT OF THE BAG YOU STUPID OLD BAG. Within hours of starting this cushy new (temporary) gig, noted drug fiend Jason Bateman contacts Ethan via the classic earpiece-in-the-watch-tray and asks him to look the other way when a certain bag comes thru his aisle.
Watching the movie, you can’t help but get the sense that there’s some sort of pro-TSA agenda behind the entire thing. “TSA agents are people too” could basically be the tagline. As such, I felt obligated to do some research on the writer of this film, T.J. Fixman (sick last name, dude). While he doesn’t have a wikipedia page, I was able to discern the following by digging into various property records, voting history, and consulting the Mormons at 23andMe.:
His father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. His mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. His father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.
They try to throw you off the scent of this propaganda in the trailer with the exchange, but make no mistake, Fixman DOES have an agenda:
Ethan: I work for the Department of Homeland Security…
Bateman: That’s like the janitor at NASA calling himself an astronaut
Overall, it’s an enjoyable watch, while being beyond farfetched. Would I go out of my way to watch it? Obviously no. But let’s be real, it’s better than listening to whatever inane story your mother is trying to tell you about her friend you’ve never met while home for the holidays. Bateman plays a great bad guy, Taron brings a little bit of his Kingsman action hero moves, and Walter White’s brother in law was born to play a TSA supervisor.
Spoilers:
- The car fight scene set to the sweet, sweet tunes of Wham!’s Last Christmas is even more absurd during the movie than it was when it was making its rounds on twitter. The CGI is brutally bad.
- Now I understand the whole movie is completely outlandish, but the scene where the van guy enters the terminal to kidnap/kill Nora defies logic. First, while I’ve never been to LAX, I have yet to go an airport in America where you can so much as put your in park before someone is whistling in your face like a drumline sergeant to move. I once saw a sassy woman traffic guard berate an uber driver at JFK airport for having the audacity to pick someone up 7 ft before the pickup line. Van Guy – just leaves it running there and walks in like no big deal. Then Nora, in a major fucking airport, decides to run OUTSIDE the terminal to try to escape this guy. Worse decision making than Paris Hilton in House of Wax (2005). I suppose, this is all done so that Mateo Flores’ gay lover can do his best Lee Boyd Malvo impersonation and save the day.
- I love there being a massive terrorist plot at LAX and there’s a detective (?) with the LAPD who’s making all the calls – which terminals get shutdown, should the plane takeoff, etc. Speaking of – Taron rolling out to the plane with a fucking baggage buggy while it’s ALREADY ON THE RUNWAY.
- By far, the most absurd part of this movie is the ending. No, not Bateman being stuffed into a proverbial locker, the epilogue. Ethan & Nora are back in the airport, going thru security as citizens… to finally go Tahiti, a call back to the beginning. Only – they have a fucking 3 month old. Who the fuck would want to do that.