Carry-On

Netflix does not often deliver a film that feels this old-fashioned in the best sense. Carry-On is a Christmas Eve thriller in the Die Hard tradition: one man, one airport, an impossible situation, and the decision to do the right thing when everything is on the line.

Taron Egerton plays Ethan Kopek, a TSA agent who wants to be a cop and works with quiet discipline at LAX. When a mysterious stranger (Jason Bateman, playing against type with cold menace) approaches him before his shift, the trap snaps shut fast. Let a package through security or watch your pregnant girlfriend die. The premise is clean and the film never complicates it with unnecessary subplots.

What works here from a values standpoint is almost everything structural. Ethan is a working-class man with ambitions and a moral spine. The film does not sneer at his job or his aspiration to move up through law enforcement. It treats both as legitimate and worth respecting. When the pregnancy reveal lands, the stakes crystallize: he is fighting for his unborn child, his partner, and 250 strangers who have no idea what is happening above them.

The Christmas setting is not cosmetic. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and writer T.J. Fixman use it the way the best holiday thrillers do, as a reminder that families being together and safe is not a small thing. That is worth protecting. Ethan's final choice reinforces this directly.

FBI agent Nora Parisi (Danielle Deadwyler) is the best kind of supporting character: sharp, credible, and not there to lecture anyone. She figures things out in real time and acts. Law enforcement in this film is competent and good-faith, which alone puts it above half the genre output of the last five years.

The film is not perfect. Bateman's villain is deliberately opaque about his motivations in a way that reads as ideological caution rather than genuine mystery. A clearer motive would have made the threat more coherent. And the gender casting of the FBI lead is a choice that feels more like optics than storytelling, though Deadwyler earns her scenes.

But these are minor complaints against a film that runs on genuine heroism, family stakes, and competence under pressure. Carry-On does what thrillers are supposed to do: it makes you care whether one man lives or dies, and it reminds you why protecting the people you love is worth any cost.

This is the rare Netflix action film you can watch with your family and recommend without reservations. Score: +17 TRAD.