Category: Taron Egerton

CARRY-ON

By Marc S. Sanders

Action movies have been done to death, haven’t they?  Yet, don’t we still get a kick out of them?

Sure, I need my TCM classics like It Happened One Night or my updated biographies like Angelina Jolie’s Maria, but action movies are like the best junk food without any of the calories.  Still, an action picture has to have that special attraction if it is to stand apart from the others.  I got bloated by the time I got to the fourth Lethal Weapon.  The first is a perfect wham bang shoot ‘em up set during Christmas time. Now Netflix grants us a long-lasting candy cane with its airport run around chaser flick known as Carry-On.

What makes this mad bomber fest a smash is that the hero, TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), actually cries out of fear and pain as the bad guy beats up on him and frightens him into direct obedience.  He begs with tears coming down his cheeks for the bad guy to just stop with his mission.  He screams “WHY ME?”  The Rock, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Ford, Gibson – those guys don’t cry.  Yet, little Ethan Kopek does, and once he gets his wits about him does he truly become a super hero.  I recall the moment happens in the last twenty minutes of the picture.  Ethan throws off his pansy TSA uniform shirt and makes a go at saving the day in his black undershirt.  Now he’s earned John McClane’s respect.

On the busiest travel day of the year, December 24th, Ethan is assigned to scan the carry on luggage ensuring travelers have not packed contraband items.  He and his colleagues have to put up with all the typical TSA complaints that come with the job.  My hat’s off to screenwriter T.J. Fixman for allowing some time to show the challenges of this occupation.  It adds some truth, comedy and depth to a thankless job that’s hardly celebrated or acknowledged like cops, doctors, athletes, and attorneys.  

Ethan is handed an earpiece and a mysterious voice, provided by Jason Bateman, gives him direct instructions to allow one black suitcase with a red ribbon to pass through inspection.  If Ethan deviates in any way at all, the voice promises that Nora (Sophia Carson) will be killed.  She is Ethan’s pregnant girlfriend and also runs airport security at LAX.  

Movies like this function like a game or sport.  The villain sets up boundaries.  How is Ethan going to save the day or get around the unexpected while trying to avoid harm to Nora or the airport as a whole?  As far as he knows, he is always being watched by the guy talking in his ear.  There’s rules and obstacles he must observe.  Granted, Carry-On allows a lot of unlikely and hard to buy conveniences to let our hero obtain the advantage, but he’s also not Superman, and at times when you believe Ethan is coming out ahead, Bateman’s antagonist changes up the game.  

Heck! A bomb is activated not at the end of the movie, but dead center right in the middle of the story.  Normally, the end all be all explosive serves as the final exclamation point with the expected digital clock countdown.  However, in Carry-On if it can get deactivated, there will still be more story to go.  Bateman’s villain really has everything thought out and Egerton’s character has no choice but to man up to the plate once again.

A side story with Danielle Deadwyler as an investigative cop named Elena will eventually intersect with the main narrative.  It’s nothing special until a car ride on the way to the airport plays Wham’s Last Christmas on the radio and the scene explodes into a mind-blowing thrill reminiscent of what I saw in Children Of Men twenty years ago.  The construction of this scene alone is absolute fun.  

Deadwyler’s character is written with a lot of carte blanche to allow Ethan to save the day.  No, none of this is ever likely to be how things go.  Yet, I recall Arnold Schwarzenegger being thrown out of an airplane and surviving a crash landing in a garbage heap thirty thousand feet below (Eraser).

If you watch Carry-On, I will not be surprised if you protest its merits based on a collection of plot holes.  The most glaring one to me is that LAX does not look nearly as crowded as the script insists, nor what I’d expect on Christmas Eve day.  Also, traffic is really easy to get around on the way to the airport.  (New Orleans fills in for Los Angeles.). However, just because Dreamworks and Netflix cut corners on spending for more extras and scenic inconveniences, it does not mean my enjoyment with the film is suspended. 

To make up for where the film’s budget might have come in the way, there are storyline surprises that enter from nowhere. Logic is applied to what’s inserted at these opportune times.  Ethan and Elena experience a set back and now new forms of game play must take hold.  You accept what’s thrown at you because of the cast and set ups.

Taron Egerton is a deliberately wimpy, but also an attractive, unlikely hero.  Jason Bateman ranks with other impressive Die Hard type movie villains like Alan Rickman, Tommy Lee Jones and Dennis Hopper.

Carry-On’s director, Jaume Collet-Serra, is well aware of the near miss escapes that allow his movie to…well…carry on.  He really doesn’t try to hide or distract from the plot holes or questions that audiences may argue.  Yet, I say who cares? This cast of mostly unknowns step up to embrace the dialogue and circumstances of the script while trying to win the game.  

Look, anything you see in Carry-On can theoretically happen.  

Would it happen?  

Let’s just change the subject please.  You have a plane to catch.

ROCKETMAN (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Dexter Fletcher
Cast: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A musical fantasy about Elton John’s (Egerton) breakthrough years in the 1970s.


Much more so than Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman feels like a genuine musical.  On top of that, it also provides much more insight into the lead character than Rhapsody did.  I did feel that it was stretching a bit, trying a bit too hard to pluck the old heartstrings towards the end of the film.  But the fact remains that I was more invested in the Elton John character than Freddie Mercury.

I think a big part of that improvement is due to the way Rocketman is structured.  The entire film is played out in a series of flashbacks, ostensibly during a group therapy session at a rehab clinic.  I say “ostensibly” because, in the opening moments of the film, he apparently walks into the session moments after abandoning his Madison Square Garden concert.  He is in full Elton John regalia: a flaming orange and red outfit complete with spreading wings on his back and devil horns on his head.  Through most of the film (after his meteoric rise to fame), he will do his best to live up to the devilish nature of this costume.

(This structure is not new…see, for example, De-Lovely, in which Cole Porter defends his life to a mysterious figure at the moment of his death.)

I have said over and over again, on Facebook and to my fellow cinephiles, how I cannot handle movies or TV shows with loathsome characters as the leads.  I can never and will never watch the TV show Mad Men.  No power on earth will ever compel me to sit through another screening of What About Bob? If someone had shot Jennifer Lawrence’s character in American Hustle with a shotgun, I would have cheered.

And yet here is Rocketman, featuring a lead character who, in the course of the movie…let me see…gets himself addicted to drugs and alcohol, succeeds in alienating anyone and everyone close to him, attempts suicide, gets the venue city name wrong during a massive concert (that’s a BIG no-no), ditches the people who made him famous in the first place out of misplaced affection for his smarmy manager/lover, and marries a woman (out of nowhere) knowing full well he is gay.

He does all of these things, and yet I was still on his side.  Weird, right?  The last time I felt that kind of empathy for a troubled lead character was in Ray.  (I’m not equating the two films, just remarking on their similarity.)  If I had to draw a line connecting those two films, and why I was able to handle their anti-social tendencies, the first things that come to mind are their music and their backstories.  The music produced by Ray Charles and Elton John (and Elton’s inseparable collaborator, Bernie Taupin) is on such a level that it was intriguing to me to watch their characters evolve, to see where such music comes from, and how much suffering is sometimes (always?) necessary for greatness to be achieved.

Another aspect of Rocketman’s success is the way unique visual tricks were used to convey the extreme emotional impact of certain events in Elton John’s life.  I’m thinking especially of his first concert at the famed Troubador nightclub in Los Angeles.  After a few agonizing seconds of nervous silence, Elton and his band break into “Crocodile Rock”, and when the bouncy chorus begins with its high, ‘50s-esque falsettos, there is a glorious moment when Elton, the band, and the crowd slowly levitate in the air, transported by the music.  I can imagine the real Elton John describing that moment in that specific way.  Or any number of performers describing their one supremely perfect moment in the spotlight, that one fleeting moment in time when it felt like the world revolved around them and their music, or their monologue, or their pas-de-deux.  It’s a magical sequence.

I cannot call Rocketman a perfect biopic.  As I mentioned before, it tries a little too hard at the end.  There is a bit of speechifying that is intended to get a gut-wrenching emotional reaction, but which I felt was a little too much of a muchness.  But it is an improvement on Bohemian Rhapsody.  I got a much fuller picture of Elton John’s life before he became THE Elton John, and as such, I was much more invested in how things turned out.