A great thriller lives and dies by its complexity. Movies like All the President’s Men or Blow Out create intricate, detailed worlds of mystery that pull you in before leaving you at the center of the labyrinth to unwind yourself in the days that follow. A solid B-tier thriller, however, is all about simplicity. These are movies like Taken and Phone Booth that you might not necessarily choose to put on, but never say no to if you find them on cable. What makes these movies so fun, and so endlessly rewatchable, is how effectively they wring every last drop of mystery and tension out of a deceptively simple premise. And Carry-On, the new holiday airport thriller from Netflix, is about as solid a B-tier thriller as you’re ever going to find.
The movie follows Ethan (Taron Egerton), a bored TSA agent with dreams of being a police officer. But as long as he’s stuck working at LAX, he’s determined to put as little thought into his work as possible, much to the dismay of his newly pregnant girlfriend (Sofia Carson), who would love to see him get a promotion or finally join the LAPD. Unfortunately for Ethan’s minimal effort streak, during a Christmas Eve shift on the X-ray machine, he receives an earpiece with which a terrorist (Jason Bateman) tells him his girlfriend’s going to die unless he lets a certain bag through the machine.
All this setup takes less than 10 minutes to communicate, and now we’re off on a duel of wits between Ethan and a terrorist with a massive head start and an eye on every security camera in LAX. Director Jaume Collet-Serra is a master of these cable thrillers — with his Blake Lively shark survival movie The Shallows being a particular standout — but it’s these earliest moments where he’s at his very best.
While the plots of some movies unfold, revealing themselves gradually to the audience, Collet-Serra’s thrillers feel like watching someone make origami, where every fold of the plot is crucial, precise, and surprisingly intricate. His protagonists start with the easy, obvious moves: Ethan tries calling the cops on his cellphone under the table, and sending a text with his Apple Watch, but each gets stopped instantly; now the folds have to get more delicate and complicated. Suddenly, we’re knee-deep in secret messages, nerve agents, airport codes, and TSA tricks, and Collet-Serra strings us along beautifully for each new reveal or twist in the story.
But for all the talents of Collet-Serra in this particular subgenre, Carry-On’s real strength lies in the performances of its two leads. Egerton and Bateman are either on screen or talking for nearly every moment of the movie’s two-hour run time, and still each delivery and airport-based chess move crackles with energy until their inevitable, climactic showdown.
Egerton has proven himself as a leading man a few times before, between being a spy in Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman movies and rocking the piano as Elton John in Rocketman, but Carry-On is the first time the 35-year-old actor has really shown his age and proven he can play an older character doing a slower, less suave kind of action. He gives a quietly determined performance here that can’t help but to make you hope he’ll return for similar roles in all fields of seemingly boring service — maybe he and Collet-Serra can team up for a Notary Public thriller next, since Ben Affleck has the Accountant lane covered already?
The real treat here, though, is Jason Bateman, who gets to play sinister in a way he’s never really been allowed — though Ozark lets him dip his toe in the villain pond every now and again. It’s a straightforward, uncomplicatedly evil kind of character that we’ve rarely seen in thrillers over the last decade or so: He’s just a guy who’s here to get paid and kills lots of people. But Bateman plays the character with a panache that cleverly hides just how much this guy relishes in his evil work, and being good at it. His terrorist is always a step ahead and more than content to watch people like Ethan play games that Bateman’s character is already positive he’s won.
Given how great both leads are, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the only real turbulent interruption to Carry-On’s otherwise excellent tension comes when the movie breaks from its central duel to introduce a police detective (Danielle Deadwyler) who finds herself accidentally thrust into the middle of the action. As with so many of these thrillers, the cop character both feels like an unwelcome distraction from the movie’s main event, and is completely integral to tying together a plot that was more interested in creating a fun premise than a mystery that makes sense. But it’s hard to blame the movie for a so-so conclusion when the journey to get there was as fun as Carry-On’s.
In another era, this is the kind of movie that when you come home for the holidays, you’d find out your parents have watched six or seven times, simply because it’s playing on TNT and they stop channel surfing every time they see it. And who could blame them? Carry-On is tremendous fun. It won’t blow you away, it won’t replace Die Hard as your dad’s favorite winking answer to what’s your favorite Christmas movie, but it will entertain you and whoever else is watching every single time you turn it on. It’s just a shame you’ll never be able to catch it on cable halfway through.
Carry-On is now streaming on Netflix.
