At The Movies: Thrills and spills abound in legal thriller Juror #2, airport actioner Carry-On

Juror #2 (PG13)

114 minutes, available on Max and Apple TV+
★★★★☆

The story: Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood’s 40th directorial feature has a juror (Nicholas Hoult) in a high-profile murder trial weighing a crisis of conscience.

In Juror #2, a roughneck (Gabriel Basso) in Savannah, Georgia, is charged with killing his girlfriend (Eastwood’s daughter Francesca Eastwood) after a spat at a local bar. Her body was later found under a bridge.

Hoult headlines as the nice guy magazine writer-cum-expectant father, who comes to the sickening realisation he was on the same road on the night of the crime and perhaps it was not a deer his Toyota 4Runner had hit in the rain.

The sentence for vehicular homicide is 30 years. So, rather than implicate himself, he sets forth to sway the jury into acquitting the wrongly accused.

But his 11 motley fellow jurors have their own gender and sociocultural biases. They are exhausted, confined for days in the courthouse and, unanimously, voting guilty to get home sooner.

J.K. Simmons’ retired detective is the sole sceptic among them. His sleuthing opens the proverbial can of worms, and Toni Collette is the tenacious prosecutor with political ambitions.

Clint Eastwood, at a remarkable 94, has not a single moment left to waste. He lays out the scenario cleanly, clearly, impartially, and the plain-speaking drama is thrilling as every act muddies and raises the ethical stakes.

It is a thought-provoking grown-up study in truth, compromise, and the title character’s tormenting guilt. The excellent performances led by Hoult and Collette – who played his mother in About A Boy (2002) – include not least Chris Messina as the hapless public defender advocating for justice in a flawed American legal system.

Hot take: The morality play is riveting right through to – stay for it – the closing gut punch.

Carry-On (NC16)

119 minutes, available on Netflix
★★★☆☆

The story: Transportation security officer Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is assigned to baggage scanning at Los Angeles International Airport on Christmas Eve when he is blackmailed into clearing a dangerous package for a commercial flight.

What would Liam Neeson do?

That must be the question Ethan is asking himself because the American action thriller Carry-On is by director Jaume Collet-Serra, who entrapped Northern Irish actor Neeson in much the same single-location ticking-time-bomb predicaments in Non-Stop (2014) and The Commuter (2018).

The criminal mastermind played by Jason Bateman is also in the terminal. He is surveilling Ethan, issuing him instructions via a Bluetooth earpiece while a sniper rifle is trained on Ethan’s pregnant girlfriend (Sofia Carson) working at airlines operations: Get the suitcase of chemical weapons on board and she will live, although the hundreds of passengers on the plane may die.

This Netflix hit is a diverting character-driven white-knuckler of the protagonist having to somehow avert a catastrophe on one of the most chaotic days of the year at one of the busiest airports in the world.

The familiarity of testy travellers further delayed by his distraction is the droll backdrop as Collet-Serra expertly manipulates a simple scenario for outrageous perils. There is a chase around luggage carousels, as well as stabbings and hair’s breadth escapes in his cat-and-mouse game with a coolly menacing Bateman.

Welsh actor Egerton (Rocketman, 2019; the Kingsman franchise, 2014 to 2017) gives this lowly employee an everyman affability and ashen panic. Ethan is an underachiever coasting in a job he hates who finds unexpected resourcefulness, courage and smarts under pressure to meet the extraordinary circumstances.

Hot take: Holiday travel just got more nerve-racking.