Spoiler Alert if you haven't seen CARRY-ON yet.
CARRY-ON (2024)
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
There's a lot to like about the new Christmas-set thriller CARRY-ON: leading man Taron Egerton who has an every-man quality more than most movie stars and keeps getting better than ever, a cold and calculated Jason Bateman who proves he can play a villain as well as anyone else, and an intense pace that won't let up once it gets going. I wanted to love it for these reasons but story issues spoil what could have been a DIE HARD-level great thriller, making it only good enough.
The first twenty minutes has some minor problems. First, Taron has to talk to himself quite a bit while sitting less than ten feet from his co-worker. The filmmakers foolishly fail to establish how loud the security checkpoint could be which might make this believable. Instead, they just expect us to suspend disbelief, something I granted them as I gave the movie some grace early on. In the middle of the picture, we get completely sucked into that intense tone I mentioned early on. It's a great cat-and-mouse chase watching Taron try to outsmart Jason and continue to be caught over and over again. I saw it coming but a twist involving Logan Marshall-Green's character is also quite clever and the ensuing one-take car accident fight is quite a thrill, though it's packed with far too much CGI...
It's in the last twenty-five minutes that CARRY-ON comes apart. It starts to unravel as soon as Sofia Carson (the cast's weakest link) is running down the airport drop-off lanes for no good reason while being chased by the bad guy van, randomly runs into her boyfriend at the right time, and is almost killed by said bad dude but just before that happens a helpless victim makes a perfect shot with a sniper rifle and saves the day. From there, our hero decides he has the most absurd solution to everyone dying, one that involves a police detective placing all of her trust in him after their sole interaction which involved him tricking her and hitting her on the head (that kind of trust relationship worked in DIE HARD because it was well-established, it's not here). The hero solution takes the movie into a cartoonish action finale but before that happens the script gets muddled with a dumb, unnecessarily complex conspiracy. Suddenly, the above-mentioned detective solves the puzzle in ten seconds, putting together all the pieces about independent contractors staging a terrorist act and making it look like the Russians or other foreign baddies so their pay days increase. Uh huh. First off, why would smart ex-military contractors take such a chance on something that isn't definite, something as unpredictable as which way the government/political landscape is going to swing based on one disaster. Dumb idea. Furthermore, the movie didn't need any further explanation of Bateman and co's motives. When told that they were indifferent, non-idealogical agents-for-hire planting a bomb for money, that totally sufficed for me. In fact, it was refreshing to have no-nonsense baddies without an agenda other than making a lot of bucks. Then the movie has to add all this extra political layer when all we want to do is watch Taron Egerton run more.
I don't know why filmmakers keep doing this thing where they over-complicated the plot... REBEL RIDGE was guilty of the same sin. Do they watch classic action films? They're simple. They rely almost entirely on character, character interaction, and placing those characters in dangerous situations. That's it. But now, filmmakers feel the need to weave these hard-to-follow, intricate (and almost always silly) plots into otherwise perfectly basic thrillers.
It's a shame. It's a damn shame.
Watched on Netflix.
These reviews were also posted on my letterboxd account and will eventually be published on my Travis Mills filmmaker Facebook page