It’s Christmas, and a TSA agent (Taron Egerton) is in for a tumultuous workday in Carry-On, a well-intentioned but ultimately boring airport thriller from director Jaume Collet-Serra (Black Adam, Jungle Cruise).
Egerton’s Ethan Kopek has been working for the TSA for three years with no promotion; he has a baby on the way with his significant other, Nora (Sofia Carson), and aspires to be a policeman. He’s been assigned the undesirable holiday shift, where his boss (Dean Norris) is finally going to give him a shot at the screening station, controlling the conveyer belt and looking into people’s bags. It’s a step up, and he’s stoked.
However, this Christmas is going to totally suck: A nasty traveler (Jason Bateman) is scheming to get a destructive device through screening and onto a plane. Bateman’s character has a whole system in place where he speaks to Ethan through an earpiece, essentially making him his hostage. The crafty, icy Bateman can locate Ethan’s loved ones (Nora happens to work at the same airport) and have them killed if Ethan doesn’t do what he says.
What follows is a series of implausible events involving plastic guns, nerve agents, sloppy law enforcement and billions of ways to take cell phones out of play in order to move the plot along. Collet-Serra not only makes things implausible, but very hard to follow.
This fails at becoming something like Die Hard—the clear aspiration—due to a lack of humor and the goofy yet intelligent pacing that makes a good, silly thriller click. This one meanders along as Bateman drones on via an earpiece while Egerton sweats and looks scared. By the midway point of the two-hour movie, things are super-tedious.
Anybody who says Bateman is playing against type as “the traveler” clearly hasn’t seen him in Ozark. He’s played bad guys before, and this one is too understated and drab to be compelling. Egerton tries to make the most out the old “victim with a lot of moxie” trope, but his efforts are ultimately fruitless.
Don’t bother doing a double-feature of Die Hard (or the airport-set Die Hard 2) and Carry-On this holiday season. Pair Die Hard with a rewatch of Elf instead. You’ll have a lot more fun.
Carry-On is now streaming on Netflix.