Netflix Offers Holiday Thrills with Carry-On

Jaume Collet Sera’s return-to-form thriller, Carry-On, is traditional and simple in all the right places. A throwback to the action films of the 1980s with a premise reminiscent of and obviously inspired by the action classic Die Hard, this straight-to-Netflix thriller still has the juice to stand on its own. Collet Sera’s obvious love for the B-movie formula injects this movie with the heart many modern thrillers are missing.

The plot is simple yet propulsive, which is exactly what you need from a thriller like this. We follow TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) as he works the busiest night in the airport, Christmas Eve. Kopek is a bit of a drifter—following his girlfriend Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson) with no real ambition for himself. After feeling the pressure from his girlfriend and boss, Kopek volunteers for a very important shift, checking the bags. Upon finding a strange earpiece he finds himself in a cat-and-mouse game with a deranged terrorist (Jason Bateman). As he’s led through a course of tough decisions, Kopek realizes how deadly and explosive the stakes are.

Edgerton brings a nice relatability to a role of Kopek that is normally seen occupied by large muscular types. He brings that unlikely hero character to life in a believable way. This script requires him to play a performance within a performance. Kopek is stuck between protecting his family and the people of the airport, this performance walks that tightrope gracefully. The transition Kopek experiences from loser to hero could have come across as cliche or phoned in but is handled with care here by the filmmakers and Edgerton himself. He isn’t some action hero who indiscriminately goes guns blazing; he has empathy, and you feel the weight of each decision piling on his shoulders.

Bateman on the other hand is great for the opposite reason, making him the perfect foil. He revels in his benign cruelty. Jason Bateman is an unexpected pull for a character like this. Credited as simply ‘Traveler’, Bateman’s villain makes clever use of the actor’s comedy chops while still maintaining the menace needed for the conflict. The traveler isn’t physically threatening in the slightest. It’s his calm that makes him scary. He nonchalantly orders Edgerton’s Kopek to do increasingly heinous things while holding his girlfriend at gunpoint. He does all of this with the sarcasm and boredom of someone running errands. This is a case of out-of-the-box casting being successful.

This film isn’t as action-packed as some might expect. Carry-On takes a more patient approach. Instead of packing its runtime with top-to-bottom action, we transition from the initial intrigue of the traveler to a full-blown conspiracy where anyone can be involved. The action scenes ramp up, each one more intense and exciting than the last. Aside from the main stakes at hand, Serra fits small personal stakes into each fight, which makes you care even more about the results. There’s a specific set piece involving a fight in a moving car that is particularly great. The camera moves around wildly but never shakes enough to make you miss the action. Finding the balance between kinetic and discernable action can be hard, but this film found it.

While this film is successful in many aspects, it is not perfect. Certain characters feel like objects to move the plot forward or are shoehorned in. Sofia Carson is a great screen presence, but her character Nora has no personality of her own. She only seems to be involved so that Ethan has something to protect. Danielle Deadwyler also feels wasted here. She plays Detective Elena Cole, in a side plot that feels like a studio note. Aside from a stunning action sequence, nothing memorable comes from this character or her plot. This is a real shame because Deadwyler is an extremely talented performer who usually elevates her material. These plots and characters don’t take anything away from the experience as a whole, but they do temporarily distract from the main plot. The ending does a good enough job of wrapping them into the plot to not feel like a waste of time.

Carry-On is a competent adult thriller in a landscape where those are becoming increasingly rare. It won’t please everyone, and if you aren’t already a fan of thrillers like this it won’t do anything to sway you. However, if you are a fan of B-thrillers or ’80s-style action, Carry-On has a lot to offer. Collet-Sera freed himself from the Dwayne Johnson-sized shackles he found himself in and is back to making his fun and trashy genre flicks. This one is a perfect way to wind down from all of the holiday stress we all feel.