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You don’t go into a Jaume Collet-Sera thriller expecting a reinvented or even slightly renewed wheel. He’s a B-movie maestro with the ability to make a brand new film feel like it’s something you I’ve seen it half-seen a dozen times on TNT. (Although I’m going to drive really seriously House made of wax And The shallows(Arguments for another column, perhaps.) Most of his films feature an increasingly grizzled Liam Neeson in the midst of a crazy scenario—murder conspiracy on a stopover flight, “reverse amnesia,” etc.—that is taken to the point of logic and then taken beyond by extension for supreme , controlled ridiculousness. After a few snoozefests in RockLand that I didn’t even watch, JCS is back with a new muse in Taron Egerton and a new “what if” in his back pocket: suppose a TSA agent threatened to do something really bad to go through security?

Taron is no Liam, however Hand luggage Still, it’s pretty solid – the three out of five film it was born to be, taking over the Letterboxd rankings here. But it wasn’t long before both the core concept and setting got me thinking about the other, better films it reminded me of. Aside from a sparse handful of tense personal confrontations, the film pits Egerton’s budding heroic LAX TSA officer Ethan via earpiece against Jason Bateman’s diabolical villain – who remains unnamed throughout the film, referred to only as “The Traveler”. With the help of an outside evil tech henchman with access to the airport’s cameras and Google, the traveler is literally and figuratively inside Ethan’s head: he can see his every move and has enough information to subject him to psychoanalysis to undergo and hopefully manipulate him into doing his bidding. And Ethan feels particularly insecure as he finds himself in a difficult situation at work, made even worse by the news that he is becoming a father. At some points, the hostage situation feels more like a harsh therapy session, as the traveler taunts Ethan about his position in life, his failure to get started, his shortcomings as a partner.

Shades of Securitywhich is actually just a bromance dramedy between the assassinations. (Of all the indelibly classic scenes in this film, the last one in the taxi still hits the hardest: “What the hell do you still do when you drive a taxi?”) But compare a Netflix thriller to one of the best films ever made is unfair. What Hand luggage I actually remembered two early films, both of which serve as examples of how truly crazy that era was when it came to letting writers cook with ridiculous premises. A terrorist working inside an airport/airplane to implement a political agenda for shady clients? That’s all Red eyesthe 2005 Wes Craven film in which Rachel McAdams sits in the hellish economy seat next to Cillian Murphy. And a homicidal maniac has taken up residence in his victim’s ear for the duration of the film? This has the DNA of a film from three years earlier in 2002 Telephone boothone of the craziest star vehicles of this century.

It’s not even that they’re significantly better films – all three are ridiculous in their own way, both in terms of the laughs and the laughs – but respectfully, it’s hard for them Hand luggage Crew to box impressively with Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland and Joel Schumacher or McAdams, Murphy and Wes Craven. Both films have storylines that would be unlike Rod Serling’s wet dreams Hand luggage A limp two hour runtime, don’t outstay welcome, it takes about 80 minutes to get in and out.