Christmas: Carry-On (2024)

After many years of throwing money at movie stars to appear in action pictures that people forget about halfway through watching them, Netflix seems to have finally latched onto something with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Carry-On. Whether intentional or not, they have managed to reconstruct the 1990s action thriller, with all its attendant silliness and ticking time bomb fun. Not that Carry-On is ever more than an average throwback action thriller. Collet-Serra’s film is fun, but it would be just another in a long line of competent action movies if it had appeared in 1998. That it came out in December 2024 and has become the streaming service’s most-watched original film of the year (likely a result of its Christmas setting) speaks to how dire Netflix’s offerings have become, and how fundamentally appealing a straightforward thriller like Carry-On can be.

The movie concerns Taron Egerton as a put-upon TSA agent, Ethan, with a baby on the way. After being urged by his girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), to be more ambitious in the wake of her pregnancy, he asks his boss (a grumpy Dean Norris) for a promotion and ends up working the X-ray scanner at the airport on Christmas Eve. Problem is, a mysterious operator (Jason Bateman) has arranged for a deadly package to make its way through that specific TSA line, and so with Ethan now operating the scanner, the operator has to blackmail Ethan into letting through the package by threatening Nora.

The movie becomes a game of cat and mouse, with Bateman’s operator (known only as the Traveler) speaking through an earbud to Ethan and forcing him to play along with his elaborate plot, while Ethan tries to think of increasingly clever and desperate ways to alert the authorities to the Traveler’s scheme.

There are convolutions in how the plot plays out, with some leaps of logic, some unbelievable skills on display in crisis moments, and some good ol’ fashioned luck that goes the hero’s way, but there is nothing more ridiculous than what we typically get in this genre. As well, once the Traveler’s actual plan is revealed (I won’t spoil the full details), the anti-imperial, anti-establishment motivations (like a watered down Ted Kaczynski) made me think of critical yet still patriotic action movies from the 1990s, such as Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996). Despite starring a TSA agent, the film tries hard to make us root for an underdog while criticizing institutional shortcomings.

In addition to being a Netflix film, Carry-On also operates as the third film in Jaume Collet-Serra’s unofficial trilogy of transit action thrillers, after the Liam Neeson vehicles Non-Stop (2014) and The Commuter (2018). With a very similar premise to both of these films, Carry-On thrives on tension, misdirection, and the fun of watching the good guy try to come up with a plan against a ticking clock and the machinations of a villain who always seems one step ahead. Watching Ethan try to silently record his conversation via his smartwatch or pass a note to a supervisor via invisible UV ink (used to detect fake boarding passes) is fun, as is watching Bateman’s Traveler suss out every way that Ethan is trying to wiggle out of the arrangement and spoil his plot. Collet-Serra also has an appealing visual scheme. For instance, he always keeps the camera slightly in motion to maintain the film’s momentum and he finds novel ways to make text messages visually interesting on screen.

Alongside Collet-Serra’s style, Egerton’s performance is the other key aspect of the film’s effectiveness. Playing Ethan as a bit grumpy, a bit exasperated, but overall a decent man (and sporting a poorly-concealed rug to boot), it’s hard not to see Egerton trying to be Bruce Willis’ John McLane here, and he doesn’t do a bad job. Egerton is an appealing actor with a physical dexterity and sense of good timing and wit that plays as genuine rather than coy (he’s not trying to be a Ryan Reynolds-style smirking action hero at any moment here). So he conveys the necessary working-class heroism, even if the movie has to work overtime to overcome the audience’s natural dislike of the TSA and the petty tyrants who staff its numbers.

I should also give credit to Jason Bateman as the villain. Bateman transfers the kind of no-nonsense, “follow the plan” pissyness that fuels his comedic work, most notably as Michael Bluth on Arrested Development, into a psychopath who thinks of himself as just a competent middleman who doesn’t care about causing death so long as he does his job well. There’s always been some lingering resentment, even contempt, beneath Bateman’s everyman shtick, which is brought out in his work on Ozark among other dramatic fare. Here, that contempt is dialed up to 11 as his Traveler seems to delight in proving how much smarter he is than all the rubes who work in the airport.

Viewed from a Christmas lens, the movie has the classic secular Christmas movie approach of being about a man thrust into a high-stress scenario on Christmas and having to reestablish order and prioritize family in the process. Bateman’s Traveler becomes a kind of Grinch, then, who is committed to ruining Christmas for the travellers at LAX since he sees no value in their lives or dreams, but only wants the money that comes from arranging their misery. In the end, the movie criticizes the commercialism of the season and tries to have the characters recognize the “true meaning of Christmas,” in the midst of the shootouts and the defusal of bombs. It’s also no accident that it’s set at an airport; it not only harkens to Die Hard 2, but also captures one of the defining settings for so many people during the holidays. In 2024, the TSA line is as familiar to the American Christmas experience as the checkout line at the toy store.

It’s unlikely that Carry-On will garner the same B-movie status as Non-Stop or The Commuter, but it at least shows that Netflix’s big money play to flood our TVs with B-movie fare is capable at times of producing decent entertainment, instead of big money slop that features stars with zero conventional appeal. It might be the streaming movie of the moment in 2024, but it would’ve been a fitting movie to play at the multiplex on Boxing Day in 1998.

6 out of 10

Carry-On (2024, USA)

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra; written by T.J. Fixman; starring Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, Sofia Carson, Danielle Deadwyler, Theo Rossi, Logan Marshall-Green, Dean Norris, Sinqua Walls, Curtiss Cook, Josh Brener.

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