No, unfortunately, this won’t have Sid James yakking or Kenneth Williams campily sneering. While nothing will ever come close to Carry On Up The Khyber, we must admit that streamers are starting to fill that mid-range action thriller gap nicely. Like with this – Carry-On.
Years ago, this sort of stuff would have starred anyone from early Arnie or Sly, then Steven Seagal or Jean Claude Van Damme, and would have got a theatrical run right before we rented the shit out of it on VHS from a video rental store attached to a gas station.
The world has changed significantly when it comes to entertainment, but there is still definitely a place for movies like this in our hearts. Just let me grab a beer from the kitchen and then entertain me for under two hours.
Netflix this time around. They have backed Carry-On, a new action thriller from Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows). It stars Taron Egerton (Kingsman) as TSA agent Ethan Kopek, who is working the holiday shift on the X-ray scanners at an airport when he is contacted by a mysterious traveller and terrorist played by Jason Bateman.
The man blackmails Ethan into letting a particularly dangerous carry-on package slip through the scanner and onto a Christmas Eve flight, endangering the lives of everyone on board and in the airport. A game of cat and mouse develops as Ethan tries to stop what is coming.
A simple premise. Let’s hope they take inspiration from those late 1980s / early 1990s efforts and keep it lean.
Carry-On also stars Logan Marshall-Green, Sofia Carson, Danielle Deadwyler, Theo Rossi, Dean Norris, Sinqua Walls, Josh Brener, Joe Williamson, and Curtiss Cook.
The budget was a tight (these days!) $47 million and it will premiere on Netflix on December 13th.