Carry-On (Netflix) Review: Taron Egerton Saves the Airport

Jaume Collet-Serra returns to the world of high-concept thrillers with the suitably exciting Carry-On.

Well, for Netflix’s latest thrill ride, Carry-On, he’s exchanged Neeson for a younger and hungrier Taron Egerton (Kingsman, Rocketman), but little else has changed. This is still a high-concept thriller that stretches credibility, this time centred on a TSA agent who gets involved in a terrorist plot at an airport. Suitably tense and at times rather exciting, Carry-On ends up doing exactly what we should expect from the latest Serra production, and serves as a return to form after his brief stint at DC and Warner Bros.

Egerton plays Ethan Kopek, a TSA agent who seems to be stuck in life. Yes, he has a beautiful girlfriend named Nora (singer and actress Sofia Carson) who also works at the airport, and yes, he’s about to have a baby. But after he was rejected only once by the police academy, he gave up and continued working at the airport on autopilot, without thinking too much about his future and being upstaged by his co-workers. Nora does try to encourage him and make him think about his true passions, but he isn’t listening.

Things take a turn for the worse, though, when an unnamed terrorist (Jason Bateman) contacts Ethan during Christmas Day and informs him that he is to let a certain passenger carrying a mysterious carry-on bag pass through TSA without a hitch; otherwise, Nora will die. This is when a tense and ludicrous game of cat-and-mouse starts, with Ethan trying to escape this horrible situation and his smart adversary doing everything in his power to get what he wants. Meanwhile, though, an LPDA cop called Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler, of Till) investigates the murder of a Russian criminal that might be linked to Ethan’s problem.

Much like Serra’s other thrillers, Carry-On doesn’t have the most airtight plot. Anyone who’s ever been in an American airport knows that security is tight and protocols are followed to the T, which means that many of the situations that Carry-On presents probably wouldn’t be able to happen. The film asks us to believe that the bad guys can see everything from every camera at the airport, that no one notices that Ethan is constantly talking to someone through an earpiece, and that no one notices he’s letting something weird and potentially dangerous pass through the TSA scanner. It’s all very farfetched and will probably make more than one viewer groan.

Nevertheless, if one decides to give Carry-On a chance and believe in everything it’s offering, it ends up being quite the entertaining experience. Ethan is written as a well-rounded and credible protagonist; he’s a man full of insecurities, afraid of lying or taking chances, who now has to confront dangerous people in order to save both his loved ones and innocent strangers. And even though one knows that the bad guys plot wouldn’t happen in real life (at least not like this), Jason Bateman’s antagonist is sufficiently well-written, portrayed as a smart, no-nonsense kind of guy who’s capable of overcoming any sort of problem.

This results in a tense experience, full of suspenseful sequences and characters worth caring about. Nora, for example, is portrayed as a responsible and intelligent woman by Carson, and when she eventually gets involved in the plot, she isn’t treated as a damsel-in-distress or a liability. And even though most of the secondary characters are archetypes, at least they are identifiable and entertaining archetypes. We have the well-meaning best friend (Sinqua Walls), the no-nonsense boss (Dean Norris), the traitor cop (Logan Marshall-Green, looking less like Tom Hardy these days), and even the psychopathic goon (reliable character actor Theo Rossi, better known as “Shades” from Luke Cage).

And as usual, Serra does his best to elevate the material, extracting all the suspense possible from the situations Ethan gets involved in. We have him trying to pin down Bateman’s Antagonist (which results in an unexpected death); him trying to contact Nora; a confrontation between him and a goon inside the baggage-sorting room, and why not, even a final showdown inside the baggage compartment of an aeroplane. Since Ethan is not portrayed as an invincible action hero, most of these situations manage to generate tension and allow the viewer to empathise with him and believe in his character arc.

After all, Carry-On is all about Ethan. It’s about him growing as a person and realising that he’s capable of much more than he’s doing. Yes, it’s also about saving people and well, about a sub-plot regarding a congresswoman and a bill she’s trying to pass (if this feels tacked on in my review, it’s because it also feels tacked on in the movie). But if Carry-On works, it’s because Ethan is an everyday person in the same way John McClane was an everyday guy in the first three Die Hard movies. Egerton may be no early-days Bruce Willis, but he’s credible and sympathetic enough as a guy way over his head, trying to do the right thing and defeat the terrorist bad guys.

Much like most of Serra’s thrillers, Carry-On does nothing particularly new. Nevertheless, it works as a tense and exciting thrill ride, and as the kind of movie I wouldn’t recommend watching right before taking a flight. Egerton proves that he can lead an actioner outside the Kingsman franchise, Danielle Deadwyler is excellent, as always, as a determined police officer, and Jason Bateman is well-cast as a smart antagonist. Just remember to check your brain at the door, and you should be able to have a good time with Carry-On. It might not be the greatest thriller ever conceived, but it certainly works as an entertaining mid-budget offering that can be watched to fill in a lazy afternoon and carry on with your life.

Carry-On was released globally on Netflix on December 13, 2024.