Netflix Thriller Surprises Everyone With #1 Movie In The World
This Holiday season, streamers have been powering the most unlikely of films to the top of the charts, with Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans’s Red One, fresh off being battered at the box office, holding onto the number spot on Amazon since release, and Jack Black’s Satanic Christmas film, Dear Santa, is on its way to being one of Paramount+’s biggest hits of all time. Matching them is Carry-On, which debuted on Netflix on December 13, and every day since, the airport thriller has been the most popular movie on the most popular streaming service in the world.
Simple And Predictable But A Lot Of Fun
Carry-On has a simplistic plot, but that’s part of the charm. Taron Egerton has been Robin Hood and Elton John, but here, he’s Ethan, a TSA officer at LAX, targetted by Traveler, a delightfully evil Jason Bateman. Traveler uses blackmail and threats of violence against Ethan’s girlfriend to force the officer to let through one particular bag. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that the bag gets through, and yes, it is a deadly weapon, but there’s still half of the movie left to go.
Ethan is forced to make a series of moral decisions as he learns just how far he’ll go to protect his friends and family. Complicating the situation is Traveler’s network of agents, which includes the equally on-the-nose named the Watcher, played by Sons of Anarchy’s Theo Rossi, who, just like Uatu from the Marvel comics, can’t help but interfere. Dean Norris, playing a TSA agent, also appears, and then the bodies start to drop as Carry-On ends up amassing a surprisingly impressive kill count before all is said and done.
The Type Of Movie You Can’t Find In Theaters
While watching the film, I couldn’t help but think back to the similarly themed plane thriller, Red Eye, which also took a wild turn at one point. Carry-On is cut from the same cloth, but today, it stands out as a film that would have been buried in theaters but gets to thrive on streaming. For decades, theaters were filled with thrillers just like this one, mid-budget films with a fun premise and a few recognizable stars that focus more on a good time instead of being Oscar-bait or setting up a shared universe.
That’s what makes Carry-On so refreshing and why it’s resonated so strongly with viewers over the last two weeks. You can fire it up, enjoy yourself for 2 hours, and then that’s the end of the story. Besides the few B-movies that still get wide releases each year, this type of movie-going experience has been mostly priced out of cineplexes, but on streaming and in the comfort of your own home, they get to thrive.
With a budget of $47 million, or one-fifth that of Red One, Carry-On has defied even the most optimistic pre-release expectations. Critics love it, with an 87 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and though the public rating is a middling 53 percent, it could be just because a lot of the public today expects a major big-budget spectacle out of every film and forgot that this is the exact type of thriller that filled theaters every single week in the 90s. It’s predictable, and the performances are all perfectly adequate, but it’s also the most popular movie in the world right now.
Carry-On is exclusively streaming on Netflix.
