Five things to watch this weekend: Netflix’s Carry-On joins the mile-high club | Canada Voices

Carry-On (Netflix)

The most-viewed original movie to land on Netflix all year, director Jaume Collet-Serra’s delightfully ludicrous airport thriller Carry-On likely benefited from its Christmas Eve-timed story, and the fact that the streaming giant put serious marketing dollars toward letting people know the movie, you know, existed. But the film also wisely recognizes that at-home audiences need to be jolted awake approximately once every 13 seconds. Not only does the plot keep changing at a moment’s notice, but so, too, do the aesthetics.

At one point, Collet-Serra settles in for a tick-tock, surveillance-style thriller, following a lowly TSA officer (Taron Egerton) as he must shepherd a dangerous package across airport security for the slick mercenary (a perfectly evil Jason Bateman) who is threatening his wife (Sofia Carson). But just when you get a handle on the action, everything shifts. From the manic “one-take” highway shootout involving a local cop (Danielle Deadwyler) to a brutal fist fight inside a giant luggage carousel, Carry-On vibrates with a restless, eager-to-please energy that glues your eyes to the screen, even if those same peepers will inevitably roll at the many plot contrivances. In other words: It’s ideal whiz-bang Netflix entertainment. Especially for this immediate post-holiday rut.

Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos (Crave)

For the past several months, my wife and I have engaged in a nightly ritual: wrestle the children to bed, frantically answer any ignored e-mails, clean any surface that we can and then settle in for an episode of The Sopranos. While I’ve now seen the series at least eight, nine, maybe 10 times over – honestly, I lost count by the time I announced to the family that I was abandoning them for a weekend to head to SopranosCon in New Jersey back in 2019 – I felt like I was watching David Chase’s masterpiece unfold anew through the eyes of my Sopranos-newbie wife. And when we finally reached the series’ brilliant end just before Christmas, it was like cutting off contact with a dear friend. Luckily, though, HBO provided one last great gasp of the show when, earlier this year, the network produced Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary to mark the 25th anniversary of the series premiere.

Across almost three hours, Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos, Gibney offers a deep dive into the series via a psychological examination of its creator. While there is a certain eye-roll to Gibney’s setup – he interviews Chase in a replica of Dr. Melfi’s psychiatrist office – the documentarian gets the notoriously tight-lipped showrunner to spill at least some of his guts, resulting in some remarkable new details for Sopranos fanatics such as myself (and, now, my wife). While the doc at times relies too much on archival footage of the show, with juicy behind-the-scenes clips shown only sparingly, there is still enough material here to make you want to go back and start from the beginning, all over again.

Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (Prime Video)

Getting stuck on an Air Canada flight for several WiFi-less hours will do strange things to a person. Such as picking this comedy, which I vaguely recalled getting a pump-and-dump, direct-to-streaming release from Universal late last year after initially being scheduled for a full-fledged theatrical debut. But thank goodness for Air Canada’s otherwise dreadful inflight selection, as the trio behind the comedy group Please Don’t Destroy – who are currently ensconced at Saturday Night Live, making digital shorts à la their predecessors the Lonely Island – have produced a wonderfully surreal, go-for-gusto comedy that hits the sweet spot more often than not. The film following three arrested-development dorks – Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall – who embark on a treasure hunt lands only about one-third of the jokes it throws at the wall. But when those gags stick, it’s gut-busting stuff. So much so that you can ignore the nepo-baby comments regularly thrown the way of Martin (son of SNL mainstay Tim Herlihy) and John (son of SNL writer Steve Higgins).

The Daytrippers (Criterion Channel)

This week’s column is trending more toward the personal than usual, but that’s just what happens after emerging from the holiday void. And if you’re anything like my family – or, more specifically, my in-laws – then there was no better antidote to the hectic socializing of the season than to end the day off with a low-key movie night, ideally one spent in front of the Criterion Channel surfing for nearly forgotten gems. While one evening ended with us all briefly flirting with some vintage David Mamet, the settled-upon choice of the 1996 comedy The Daytrippers proved to be the ultimate winner, thanks to some unknown calculus involving the pedigree of the cast (Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Parker Posey), the length (just 87 minutes!) and the hazy memory that it was a Sundance hit back in the day (an assumption that proved to be false; it in fact debuted at the competing Slamdance Film Festival).

The feature directorial debut of Greg Mottola (who would go on to become a key member of the Judd Apatow comedy era thanks to his work on Undeclared and Superbad), The Daytrippers is a witty, wonderfully cast, and extremely of-its-time indie comedy in which an otherwise happy wife (Davis) enlists her eccentric Long Island family to uncover whether or not her husband (Tucci) is having an affair. At the very least, you’ll walk away from the film wondering why every romantic comedy no longer features the silver-tongued Campbell Scott.

All the Old Knives (Crave)

A slow-burn spy tale focusing on two CIA agents/former lovers who reunite to rehash a long-ago botched mission, this thriller came and went without much notice back in 2022. Yet thanks to the performances of stars Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton, the thriller has just enough expensive style, steamy sex and wild plot contrivances to hold your attention. As directed by Janus Metz (Borg vs. McEnroe) and written by Olen Steinhauer, who adapts his own novel, the thriller is sleek and occasionally beautiful in its Carmel-By-the-Sea scenery. And it once again proves that Pine is by far the best of the Hollywood’s many Chrises (take that, Hemsworth, Pratt and Evans).