Carry-On is well-made thriller fare that will be an easy watch on Netflix this festive season.

Directed by the king of ‘better than they should be’ action thrillers, Jaume Collet-Serra, this movie is polished if largely unoriginal.

While shooting for Die Hard, Carry-On lands somewhere between Red Eye and Collateral.

John McClane’s cop character is swapped out for Taron Egerton’s airport security agent, Ethan Kopek, while Hans Gruber’s villain role is occupied by Jason Bateman’s mysterious The Watcher.

Kopek, an average agent at LAX without much ambition, is suddenly thrust into the world of terrorism when ‘asked’ to smuggle a package through airport security. This ‘ask’ is of course in the Godfather sense, where Kopek doesn’t have much choice but to accept the offer.

He has to decide whether to be complicit, to risk the lives of his family or to try and fight back and avoid the deaths of dozens of strangers. It is a classic thriller set-up which works well, but takes far too much on-screen time to get to.

Everything covered so far in this review can be found in the trailer, but takes a full 40 minutes of the movie, helping to push the overall runtime to almost two hours.

Egerton and Bateman have good cat-and-mouse chemistry to keep the viewer invested, but I found extra time to be the enemy of tension during the first act. Once the movie is properly off and running however, we see Collet-Serra settling into the action scenes for which he is known.

There is one particular two-minute sequence during a highway chase that is among the best action setpieces of the year.

It all leads towards a grand conclusion which is probably exactly what you would expect from a Netflix Christmas themed action movie, but it works well enough.

Carry-On has all the makings of a forgettable B-movie, but it is well acted and has a steady hand behind the camera. It does not reinvent the wheel, but who wants that at Christmas time anyway?

Rated PG-13 for Violence and Language.
3/5.

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