Carry-On

“Carry-On” refers to a hard-shell suitcase containing malevolent cargo that an unnamed Traveler (Jason Bateman) blackmails TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) to let through an LAX baggage scanner, leading to a day-long struggle between the two as Ethan frantically works to keep the unwitting airport and his newly pregnant girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) safe. It probably sounds like something you have seen before, and that’s because you have, with director Jaume Collet-Serra and writer TJ Fixman effectively functioning as movie mashup deejays, drawing from “The Rock,” “White House Down,” “Airport,” and the first three “Die Hards,” to cultivate a pastiche. Ah, but in its taut direction, reversal-laden writing, and stable of knowing performances, “Carry-On” is a pastiche with pizazz, a Netflix peak, not designed to last beyond the moment in which you stream it but delightful in that window when you do. 

Borrowing not just the Christmas Eve setting of “Die Hard” but its unrushed set-up, it’s almost startling how much time “Carry-On” takes to rev up. True, there is a time-honored slam-bang opening to rope in anyone casually clicking through streaming options, but once we meet Ethan and Nora on their way to work, Collet-Serra allows us to settle in. In fact, it takes so much time to detail the career opportunities of a TSA agent, while simultaneously sort of sticking up for the TSA as a misunderstood benevolent entity, that it skirts the fine line of propaganda. But it also means that when the script pays off Ethan’s relationship with his skeptical boss (Dean Norris) and his friendship with TSA officer Jason (Sinqua Walls), they emotionally count in a way most movies of this ilk can’t manage.

It’s Jason who gives up his post scanning baggage to let Ethan prove his worth and inadvertently put his pal in harm’s way when Traveler begins communicating with Ethan by earbud, telling him what to do and not to do, threatening Nora on whom the villain’s associate (Theo Rossi) always has eyes. It might strain credulity how often Ethan abandons his post to keep myriad balls in the air as Traveler’s demands increase, but it’s never not entertaining, the way the screenplay continually restacks the deck and puts Ethan back to square one. Egerton excels in the role by not playing so much an everyman as a nobody, a desperate guy totally out of his depth, in full flail, and living the irony that in showing initiative now he has to show more than he ever dreamed.

That desperation is palpable in other places too. There comes a point in Fixman’s screenplay where conveniences become paramount to maintaining forward momentum and keeping characters alive who by all rights probably should have bit the big one by now. And though Collet-Serra and his trio of editors help with relentless forward momentum, it’s also the performances, Egerton, certainly, but also Rossi and especially Danielle Deadwyler in the otherwise underwritten part of LAPD detective Elena Cole who in their escalating exasperation manage to sell the one-more-thing-ness with maximum pith. The only time “Carry-On” really gets out over its skis is an action-packed car crash in which Elena wrestles for control of the vehicle. Thrilling in a vacuum, it’s also scored to “Last Christmas,” meaning it’s the one moment “Carry-On” breaks and winks. Not cool.

Bateman does not wink. In roles like “Up in the Air,” or “Air,” he brings a smug, deadpan air, and here, he recalibrates that air ever so slightly. He’s not just playing a guy one step ahead of Ethan schematically, but spiritually. “I know this guy,” Traveler says, seizing on his perception of Ethan’s lack of initiative, and it’s what Bateman seizes on too, recognizing he is not merely playing the chief heavy but the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future in one, taunting, teasing, but also inadvertently urging Ethan to discover his true self.