- UK release: December 2024 (Netflix)
- Director: Jaume Collet-Serra · Writer: T. J. Fixman
- Studio / distributor: Dylan Clark Productions; DreamWorks Pictures; Netflix
- Genre: Action thriller / single-location hostage thriller · Runtime: 119 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Taron Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Rocketman) as Ethan Kopek; Jason Bateman (Game Night, Ozark) as the Traveler; Sofia Carson (Descendants, Purple Hearts) as Nora Parisi; Danielle Deadwyler (Till) as Elena Cole
- IMDb: 6.5 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 87% critics / 52% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Jaume Collet-Serra has spent a decade working out how much tension he can wring from a confined space and a man who cannot leave it. He trapped Liam Neeson on a transatlantic flight in Non-Stop and on a commuter train in The Commuter, and now, landing on Netflix just in time for Christmas, he plants his crisis in the one building that already runs on low-grade dread: the airport on the busiest travelling day of the year. The premise is so clean you can see the whole machine from the doorway, which is usually a warning sign. Here it is the appeal.
The setup
Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is a young TSA screener at Los Angeles International, stalled in a job he took to coast and now quietly ashamed of it, with a pregnant girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), working the same terminal and a promotion he keeps not chasing. On Christmas Eve a calm voice arrives in his earpiece. A stranger, watching, knowing far too much, gives him a single instruction: let one particular bag pass through his lane unscreened, or the people he loves start dying. The bag is bad news of the catastrophic kind, and the man on the other end has thought of everything. What follows is a long shift in which Ethan has to look like he is doing his job while doing the opposite, under the eye of an antagonist who can see almost every move before he makes it.
The cast
Egerton is well cast as a decent man caught flat-footed. He plays Ethan as someone whose competence has been switched off by disappointment and gets switched back on by terror, and the gradual hardening, from rabbit to something with a plan, gives the film its spine. The smarter piece of casting is Jason Bateman as the man in his ear. Bateman has built a career on amiable exasperation, and turning that reasonable, faintly weary register towards menace is unsettling precisely because it never raises its voice. His Traveler is a logistics problem with a pulse, polite, patient, and entirely willing. Danielle Deadwyler brings real weight to a detective pulling at the same thread from the outside, and Sofia Carson is given a little more to do than the standard imperilled partner. The film belongs to the two men and the wire between them.
The craft
Collet-Serra knows this register cold, and he shoots the terminal as a pressure system: sightlines, choke points, the queue as a slow conveyor towards disaster. Lyle Vincent’s camera keeps finding the worst angle, the one where Ethan can be seen by exactly the person who must not see him, and the editing holds shots a beat longer than comfort allows. Lorne Balfe’s score does the propulsive, ticking work without smothering the quiet. There is a mid-film set piece on the airport roads that briefly slips the leash of plausibility, but the film is honest about being a ride and earns the indulgence. Mostly the craft is in the restraint: a thriller that trusts a man, a bag and a voice to carry two hours, and is right to.
How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is Die Hard 2, another airport under siege at Christmas, though this is the chamber version, claustrophobic where that one sprawled. The closer relatives are Phone Booth, with its disembodied tormentor pinning an ordinary man in place, and Collet-Serra’s own Non-Stop, which ran a near-identical engine at thirty thousand feet. Against those it holds up well. It lacks the sheer novelty Phone Booth had, and the villain’s omniscience asks you to swallow a lot of advance planning, but the concept is sturdy and the execution never fumbles it. This is the high-concept Christmas thriller doing exactly what it says on the boarding pass.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split is unusually wide. Critics have landed around 87%, broadly charmed by an efficient throwback that knows its own size, while audiences sit close to half that. The complaint from the cheaper seats is plausibility, the antagonist who has rigged too much and the security procedures that bend when the plot needs them to. Both readings are fair. If you go in counting holes you will find them. If you go in for a tight, well-acted cat-and-mouse that keeps the screws turning, you get the film the critics are praising. I am firmly with the critics here, with one eye on the seams.
Verdict
This is a lean, confident thriller that knows precisely what it is and never overreaches, and that discipline is rarer than it should be. Egerton and Bateman are an excellent mismatch, the airport is used as a genuine antagonist rather than a backdrop, and the whole thing moves. It is not reinventing the form and it asks for some generosity on logic, but it delivers the goods with a craftsman’s economy, and it is the sort of high-concept thriller I will happily put on again. 8⁄10.
Availability: Streaming on Netflix worldwide from 13 December 2024.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Carry-On went on to become one of Netflix’s biggest film successes of the period, topping the platform’s charts through the festive season and well into 2025, and continuing the run of fresh critical scores that has followed Collet-Serra’s confined thrillers. It remains exclusive to Netflix, where it is the natural pick for a Christmas Eve that wants a pulse rather than a sleigh.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for injury detail, sex references, language, threat, violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC classified Carry-On 15 on 12 December 2024, citing injury detail, sex references, language, threat and violence. The detailed category-by-category Content Advice could not be retrieved from the BBFC release page at the time of writing; the short consumer-advice line above is quoted as published.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
