Netflix Carry-On movie: Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman in satisfying 90s throwback thriller

If we were to be reductive about it, Carry-On is Die Hard in an airport. It’s a Christmas-time cat-and-mouse chat between an everyman action hero and a super bad dude.

That’s not a slight against Carry-On, a Netflix thriller starring Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman. It’s following a tried-and-tested formula and it is plenty satisfying because it colours within the lines with deftness.

It’s a throwback to those high-octane, high-stakes 1990s thrillers that used to be one of the backbones of popcorn cinema. If you were a regular moviegoer, you could reliably catch one every couple of months, starring Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Ben Affleck or Will Smith.

Yes, Bruce Willis too.

Of course, Die Hard 2 was set in an airport, but Carry-On’s vibe is closer to the OG.

Studios don’t make these mid-budget thrillers much anymore, and they certainly don’t for the cinema, which is a shame because even when they weren’t amazing (and few were), walking out, you were still satiated.

You sat in the dark, swathed in air-conditioning and were rewarded with a clear throughline, some decent performances and a neat-and-tidy story that resolved. It was a full meal.

Now, you get outlandish “event” movies that cost $US250 million starring The Rock as himself, and with a wink to a sequel you don’t really want. They never live up to all that money spent.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Carry-On is centred on Ethan (Egerton), a junior Transport Security Administration (TSA) officer at LAX.

He feels numb and stuck in life, not having realised his dream career as a cop. His girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), who also works at the airport but as an operations manager, is pregnant and she wants him to try and get out of this funk.

Reporting to their shifts on Christmas Eve, they know they’re in for a time. It’s one of the busiest and most stressful days. But Ethan has no idea just how bad it’s going to get.

A last-minute switch-up in assignments sees him manning the security machines for the first time when he finds an ear-piece that tells him he is going to let through a carry-on suitcase and wave through its owner, or his girlfriend will be killed.

The voice on the other end is a character that is only identified as The Traveller (Bateman), a high-end fixer who has been hired to execute a plot. We know he’s unscrupulous and will do whatever it takes because in the opening scene, he dispassionately killed two people and set a bag of money alight.

The rules of the game are set but Ethan isn’t the entry-level hack The Traveller underestimated him to be, and they’ll chase each other around the airport, through its bowels.

Guns will be fired, people will be stabbed and lots of panicked starring will occur.

The plot has some unnecessary complications but it is relatively straightforward – at the end of everything, if you cast your mind back to the twists, they all add up. Just don’t think too hard about disappearing injuries sustained earlier in the story.

There’s a good support cast too – Danielle Deadwyler as a detective, Dean Norris as the TSA supervisor, Theo Rossi as The Traveller’s collaborator who has tapped into LAX’s security cameras and Sinqua Walls as Ethan’s co-worker.

Carry-On is a more serious affair than Die Hard. It doesn’t have that yippee-ki-yay attitude but everyone here is doing a perfectly serviceable job in a perfectly serviceable action thriller.

Rating: 3/5

Carry-On is streaming on Netflix