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As someone who used to work service industry jobs, there’s a looming dread about working around the holidays—high stress, large crowds, and a desire just to get out of there as quickly as possible without any issues. Carry-On takes this familiarly uncomfortable feeling and ramps it up tenfold, setting it at one of the worst places imaginable: the TSA line at LAX. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new entrant into the “Is this a Christmas movie?” pantheon.
The already unpleasant situation is compounded further for our main character, Ethan (Taron Egerton), an aimless TSA agent who only the night before learned that his girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), an airline employee, is pregnant. It’s a pleasant surprise but a rude awakening for the wannabe police officer, and Ethan takes the unexpected news as an opportunity to turn off cruise control, try to change his passive ways, and ask for a promotion. Granted a trial period for a role with more responsibility, Ethan is put in charge of scanning luggage on one of the security lines on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest travel days of the year. Unbeknownst to Ethan, his day is about to get a lot worse than having to deal with the umpteenth passenger who forgets to put their iPad in the bin: an unnamed mass murderer for hire (Jason Bateman) coerces him to let a passenger carrying a suitcase full of deadly nerve gas through, threatening his girlfriend with an ominous deal of “one bag, for one life.”While Carry-On is no Die Hard (1988), it mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do in creating an action-thriller that makes good use of a fun conceit. It’s a largely predictable film—a rudderless guy is thrust into action to save the day and realizes he just needed to believe in himself—that doesn’t do a whole lot to advance the genre and has an incomprehensibly bad CGI set piece, but it’s saved by its fun concept and an entertaining supporting cast. PG-13, 119 min.
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