Many have noticed similarities between the Netflix film with Taron Egerton and this almost-forgotten title from the early 2000s
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| Image Credit: Netflix |
Streaming platforms are giving us a very action-packed Christmas. While Red One, with Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, is a hit on Prime Video, one of the most viewed films of recent weeks on Netflix is Carry-On, starring Taron Egerton as a security officer at Los Angeles airport. In the film directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (Non-Stop and The Train Guy are the closest to this one), the day experienced by poor Ethan Kopek is not a normal working day: once he starts working for the first time at baggage control, he is contacted by a mysterious man who forces him to commit criminal acts, threatening to kill his pregnant girlfriend otherwise. All this on Christmas Eve.
It goes without saying that Ethan eventually gets the better of the villain played by Jason Bateman, but there is something in the plot that reminded many of another perhaps too forgotten film from the early 2000s. We are talking about Phone Booth, directed by Joel Schumacher. In this story that screenwriter Larry Cohen had even presented to Alfred Hitchcock in the 60s, the character played by Colin Farrell is a third-rate manager who receives a call while he is in a phone booth: on the other end, there is a man armed with a rifle who threatens him if he does not do exactly what he says.
Stripped down to the bare minimum, the plot of Carry-On seems to be the same as Line of Fire, with the usual differences: in the film with Taron Egerton we always know who the bad guy is and the two even meet several times before the grand finale, while in Joel Schumacher's thriller it is only at the end that Kiefer Sutherland makes his appearance, after having kept us glued to that phone booth for an hour and a half. The demonstration of how the thriller genre can be based on the same premises then declined differently. Carry-On may not be so original, but apparently even with premises already seen it is managing to conquer a lot of audiences on Netflix.