Carry-On review: Netflix’s B-movie Die Hard offers plenty of Christmas action thrills

Carry-On may be the ideal Netflix movie. The new film is part of one of cinema’s greatest and most entertaining subgenres: the holiday action movie. While its debt to titles like Die Hard and the Shane Black-penned Lethal Weapon is made immediately clear, Carry-On lacks the extra edge of precision and the movie star-level charisma that elevated those titles beyond simple action-movie fare and into genre classics. It is a B-movie, plain and simple, and one that feels closer to beloved ’90s thrillers like Con Air and Air Force One than any genuine classics.

That makes it a perfect action movie to boot up on Netflix and spend two hours watching on your couch one quiet Friday night. Carry-On is also made by a filmmaker, Jaume Collet-Serra, who specializes in the kind of B-grade genre movies that it follows in the footsteps of. The past few years have marked a bit of a low point for Collet-Serra, who was convinced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to take a break for a time from his mid-budget genre exercises and make regrettable blockbusters like Jungle Cruise and Black Adam. He has, thankfully, left that chapter of his career behind, and he has now returned with one of his most propulsive and entertaining thrillers to date.

Like plenty of iconic action movies before it, Carry-On follows a protagonist, Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), who hasn’t yet lived up to his full potential. After failing his police academy entrance exam years ago, Ethan has resigned himself to an unfulfilling existence coasting along with minimal effort as a Transpartation Security Administration (TSA) agent at LAX. The news that his longtime girlfriend, fellow airport security worker Nora (Sofia Carson), is pregnant, however, forces Ethan to start thinking about what kind of a life he wants for himself, Nora, and their future child. When Nora further urges him to give his dream another shot, Ethan decides to try putting more effort into his life by petitioning his boss, Phil (Dean Norris), for a more important shift working baggage inspection on Christmas Eve.

Carry-On does not, in other words, find Ethan at the same point in his life that Die Hard finds John McClane. His complacency hasn’t yet cost him everything, and he’s forced out of his dead-eyed autopilot routine when he ends up in possession of an earbud that connects him with a smarmy, sociopathic, and self-described “facilitator” referred to by T.J. Fixman’s script only as “the Traveler” (Jason Bateman). Ethan subsequently finds himself in a nightmare of a position when the Traveler orders him to let a dangerous suitcase past TSA’s metal detectors and onto a packed flight in exchange for Nora’s life.

Despite running nearly two hours long, Carry-On wastes little time in trapping its unlikely hero in its central, seemingly inescapable situation. Fixman’s script, fortunately, only occasionally has to push the film’s logic into tenuous territory in order to sustain Ethan’s conflict with the Traveler. For the most part, the neat, unambitious thriller finds inexhaustible magic in its villain’s perfectly maddening arrogance and in Ethan’s internal struggle over his love for Nora and the responsibility he feels to the 250 passengers who will likely die if he does what the Traveler wants. Carry-On doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it cares about its underdog protagonist, and Egerton plays his character’s increasing desperation and hopelessness with enough sincerity to make you buy in.

Carry-On never goes anywhere particularly surprising, and the full scope of the Traveler’s job only makes a paper-thin amount of sense. But the film plays its cards right. It clips along at an adrenaline-pumping pace from beginning to end, trimming as much narrative fat from its prologue and climax as it can along the way. Collet-Serra, meanwhile, brings the same economical direction to Carry-On that he has employed in previous thrillers like The Shallows and Non-Stop. Outside of one VFX-heavy scene in a car, Collet-Serra rarely flexes stylistically in Carry-On. The director, instead, spends much of the film communicating information and emotions in as few shots as possible, trusting in the cutting patterns of his editors and the sturdiness of Fixman’s screenplay.

Text messages and phone calls often appear in the same frames as Carry-On‘s actors, a decision that not only reinforces Collet-Serra’s place as one of the few genre filmmakers working today who hasn’t shied away from the visual and narrative possibilities of our current digital age, but also keeps the film’s constant flow of information running at a healthy, brisk pace at all times. Even a largely unnecessary B-plot involving an LAPD detective (a welcome Danielle Deadwyler) who catches onto the Traveler’s trail of crimes ends up supporting Carry-On‘s A-storyline rather than weighing the film down because of how strictly Collet-Serra and his collaborators hold onto the film’s fast, overarching rhythm.

Carry-On ultimately marks a welcome return to form for its director. It is, like many of his best movies, a tightly wound thriller that doesn’t have any lofty political or thematic goals. Carry-On just wants to entertain you, and it trusts so completely in its story of a good man trying to find the right way out of an impossible conflict that it succeeds at doing just that. Even the film’s overly crisp, all-too-familiar digital Netflix sheen feels more like a feature than a bug here, one befitting a movie as slickly made, confident, and polished as this one. It’s a great time, and that’s about as good a present as any Netflix subscriber could hope to get from the streamer at this most merry time of the year.

Carry-On is streaming now on Netflix.