Carry-On (2024)

Carry-On arrives as a Christmas Eve thriller of the old school: a TSA officer named Ethan is blackmailed through an earbud by a soft-spoken mercenary, and the fate of two hundred and fifty passengers rests on whether one suitcase gets scanned. Jaume Collet-Serra directs with the efficiency of a man who has done this before and intends to do it again. It was watched by a great many people and reviewed kindly. It is, in the taxonomy we maintain here, a specimen of low ambient social consciousness.

The picture does assemble a cast more varied than the genre requires. Danielle Deadwyler plays an LAPD detective with competence and no comment. Sofia Carson, Sinqua Walls, and Tonatiuh fill supporting roles. Nobody in the screenplay remarks on any of it, which keeps the tally modest. The same restraint governs the subplot in which a coerced courier is motivated by the captivity of his husband, a same-sex marriage presented as ordinary furniture. Nora, the pregnant girlfriend, evades a killer in a parking garage and talks a detective into letting a plane depart, earning a small nod without an accompanying argument. The villain's scheme, once revealed, is a false-flag operation meant to implicate Russia and loosen congressional purse strings for weapons manufacturers. That is a war-profiteering critique delivered through mechanics, not sermons. The TSA praised the film for making one of its officers look heroic, which tells you where the moral center sits.

On the remaining indices the film is a clean sheet. Race is never a subject. The climate does not appear. No character's body is a theme. No one is neurodivergent. History is not revised, only borrowed for a contemporary airport. The result is a competent, well-paced entertainment that carries its progressive gestures the way a traveler carries a neck pillow: lightly, and without announcing them at the gate.