Carry-On

I don’t understand this recent trend of shitty action movies getting good reviews. It happened early this year with The Beekeeper, a forgettable Jason Statham movie that was beloved for no conceivable reason. Carry-On is the latest. There’s already been endless comparisons to Die Hard, which is like saying The Emoji Movie is like a Pixar film. Has no one actually seen the greatest action movie ever made? Are they just assuming it’s something shitty like Carry-On?

The magic of Die Hard, beyond its genre-defying action sequences, is that there are 47 speaking roles and each character is a distinct, lovable human being. Even goons without any dialogue have identifiable moments, like the bad guy who eyes a Nestle Crunch multiple times before finally grabbing it and taking a bite. Die Hard has countless moments like that. Carry-On has zero. How is Carry-On like Die Hard? It takes place on Christmas Eve and “just a guy” has to stop a terrorist plot.

I genuinely hope Theo Rossi has always wanted to play a cartoonishly evil goon. If not, forcing an actor like Theo Rossi to do this sort of shit is downright criminal. His beautiful performance in Emily the Criminal is one of the most three-dimensional gangster characters I’ve ever seen. When you have a literal A/B comparison like this, it makes me want to pull my hair out and smash my television. It doesn’t make me want to recommend it to a friend saying, “It’s stupid but fun!”

Like 90% of movies these days, it’s 30 minutes too long, but this one you can feel it. There are long sequences where you say out loud, “I don’t give a shit! We don’t need to know this!” and then those sequences ended up being not important—go figure.

Almost everything about this movie is dumb. Jason Bateman has this cool, 3D-printed gun that looks like those see-through phones everyone had in the 1990s. “This is a plastic gun…” Jason Bateman says, out loud, in the movie. Ok— not as cool. Then he says something mumbled at rapid speed, offscreen, likely ADR’d: “The bullets use electric heat and if you shoot it too many times your hand will blow off!” Wait… what? Why did you just tell us—Ohhh… ok, so at the end of the movie, this gun is gonna blow up in someone’s face, huh? Got it! Well, guess what happens at the end when a bad dude fires a bunch at Taron Egerton? If that had happened without Jason Bateman explaining it, some people wouldn’t understand why the gun blew up at the end. We can’t confuse people because this movie is real fucking dumb.

Despite everyone ignoring the reason Die Hard is good, Taron Egerton did his best to bring to the movie what Bruce Willis did for Die Hard. This movie has way too much running, but you can tell he did a lot of work to put some life and character into those running sequences. There’s a really neat car crash gunfight in this movie for some reason. It’s the only sequence in the movie with real action and intensity, so it feels shoehorned instead of a standout. After this INSANE action sequence, they show Jason Bateman load a parachute into his backpack, he gets on the plane, goes into the cargo hold, puts on the parachute—and then they don’t do anything with the parachute.

If Alan Rickman didn’t die at the end of Die Hard, most people would still want to have a drink with Hans Gruber. He was just so cool and interesting and lovable and funny yet scary and deadly. Imagine how fucking amazing Jason Bateman could be in a role like that? Instead, his “character” couldn’t be less interesting. He has one tone, it’s grey, and as boring as drywall.

But the truly despicable TSA copaganda throughout this bootlicking movie might be Carry-On’s worst offense. You know how Starship Troopers is actually a meta-movie that’s a 90-minute propaganda recruiting video for space marines within that movie’s universe? Carry-On is a 120-minute propaganda recruiting video for TSA agents within the Trap universe. I’m sure it was a situation where they couldn’t use all the logos and shit without the TSA’s stamp of approval, so they made it a bizarro-world version of the TSA, but I thought it was genuinely offensive at points. I hate the TSA, but even your average airport security guy watching this movie would ask, “What the fuck is this shit?”

Imagine how interesting this movie could have been if the TSA was the real TSA. All of the employees are mean weirdos who seemingly make up rules on the spot because they enjoy being cruel. Jason Bateman calls up, charming and funny and smart as hell. Sure, he’s threatening and serious, but he almost convinces our TSA agent instead of forcing him. And then, just like that one movie Die Hard, we’re starting to root for the villain just as much as we are the good guy. Now, imagine letting Theo Rossi cook in a movie like that with a real, human character? To me, that would be a good dumb movie. This is just a dumb movie, and it drives me fucking crazy how often dumb movies get good reviews.