de facto film reviews 1 star

Carry-On is the new action-thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra, who previously helmed House of Wax and The Shallows. He is a competent craftsman that knows how to get the job done just enough to entertain, put a slight spin on old tropes and keep the pieces moving. Yet, here, the entire thing falls apart from the minute a sleepwalking Taron Egerton enters the frame. In a film where there are multiple cinematic sins, not giving smelling salts to your leading man, the star of an action film, has to rank among the tops for this genre.

Courtesy Netflix

Egerton, as with Serra, is a talented individual who has done good work. He also seems like an intelligent fellow, so perhaps he checked out and cashed in when he read this script. This is a film that is not bereft of talent in front of or behind the camera, so why did it fail so dramatically? Let us start with the fact we have seen this all before, and done much better. The film tries to be Die Hard 1, 2 and 3, yet without building any interest in the characters or their situations.

Danielle Deadwyler, an astonishing actress who gave a terrific performance in the thousand times better The Piano Lesson, gets perhaps the worst role of her career, and is subjected to the lousiest action sequence of the year, in which her detective, a character that until about ten minutes earlier, had vanished for much of the film, suddenly reappears and is in mortal danger inside a moving vehicle. Her character is shown getting punched, struggling with a gun, which goes off, and her head banging into a side window, which blows out from getting hit, multiple times by multiple vehicles. Yet, she walks away unscathed.

Courtesy Netflix

This is not John McClane, of Die Hard, being victorious yet getting his share of serious wounds. We cannot care because not only do these characters never feel like they are in any serious danger, but we never get to really know them. We do get to know the villain, a character known as The Traveler, played by Jason Bateman. His partner, the Watcher, is played with five million bars of scenery chewing overacting by Theo Rossi. If he had a mustache, he might not only twirl it, but set it on fire in order to give more evidence how unhinged he is. Yet, it is Bateman who proves to be both the best and worst thing about the film.

His character is a facilitator of crimes, who had targeted a co-worker of Ethan, the Egerton character, but when Ethan’s boss shifted the work stations, it fell on Ethan to be the person cruelly blackmailed into ensuring a dangerous package is allowed onboard a plane, via carry-on, or his girlfriend, newly pregnant, will die. Had the film spent more than a minute or two to establish these characters and Ethan as someone other than a guy that does not realize what a catch he has and how stupid he would be to throw it away out of self-pity, one might find time to empathize with him. Instead, the audience is subjected to a hackneyed backstory involving how he is repeating the career disappointments of his father because of fear of success, essentially.

This would normally make the villain someone to listen to, someone to rouse our nominal hero from his funk. Instead, Bateman is given a role that, until the plot no longer requires it, is nearly unstoppable. He is also a constant talker, using “insights” that are obviously designed to control and unnerve his puppets, but also feel like the sort of “maybe the dark side of the force has a point” type of thirty miles outside Los Angeles commune naval-gazing ever placed in a character’s mouth.

Courtesy Netflix

Carry-On is not a film for those who prefer their action with any depth, or who mind when a film hits every cliché in the book. As a pure action film, it might have moments that could work, but the film fails to achieve suspension of belief. Instead, it simply builds suspension of buying in.

Carry-On is now streaming on Netflix.