Carry-On (2024)

Netflix dropped Carry On on December 13, 2024, and within its first weekend, the film racked up 57.1 million views globally. Those numbers made it the biggest Netflix original movie debut of the year. The premise is simple enough to fit on a boarding pass: a TSA agent at LAX on Christmas Eve is coerced by a mysterious traveler into letting a lethal package bypass security and board a flight to New York. What follows is a tight, single-location thriller that earns more tension than it has any right to.

The Carry On Cast and Their Roles

Taron Egerton plays Ethan Kopek, a young TSA officer stuck in a dead-end job, working the holiday shift while his pregnant girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) waits at home. Egerton is convincing as a guy who never wanted to be a hero and still isn't sure he wants to be one now. He sweats, panics, and makes bad calls. It works.

Then there's Jason Bateman as the unnamed Traveler. This is Bateman doing something he rarely gets to do: playing genuinely menacing. He's calm, surgical, and utterly unblinking. The performance borrows the quiet cruelty of a chess player who already knows the outcome. If you've only seen Bateman in comedies, this will recalibrate your sense of the man's range.

Danielle Deadwyler rounds out the key players as LAPD detective Elena Cole, who starts sniffing out that something is wrong at the airport long before anyone else catches on. She brings the same focused intensity she showed in Till, and the film is better for having her in it.

Is Carry On a Christmas Movie?

The Die Hard question, inevitably. Carry On is set entirely on Christmas Eve. The airport is strung with lights and packed with holiday travelers. Characters reference the holiday constantly. Ethan's central motivation is protecting innocent people trying to get home for Christmas. The emotional stakes are tied directly to the season.

But the Christmas setting is more functional than atmospheric. Director Jaume Collet-Serra uses the holiday primarily as a pressure cooker: airports at peak chaos, skeleton security crews, emotional travelers who just want to get on their flights. Christmas provides the conditions for the thriller, not the soul of the story. That puts it firmly in the Die Hard camp of Christmas movies, which is to say: yes, it counts, but it won't make you feel warm inside.

What Actually Works

Collet-Serra, who directed Liam Neeson through Non-Stop (another confined-space thriller), knows how to make a small space feel claustrophobic. The security checkpoint becomes an arena. Every traveler in line is a potential accomplice or victim. Every bag on the conveyor belt could be the one.

The film's best stretch runs about 40 minutes in the middle, where Ethan is trying to stall for time while the Traveler watches from the terminal, calmly sipping coffee and issuing threats through an earpiece. The cat-and-mouse dynamic is genuinely absorbing. Bateman barely raises his voice. He doesn't need to.

The script, by T.J. Fixman, does smart work with the TSA setting. Most of us have stood in those lines and wondered what the screeners actually see. Carry On weaponizes that curiosity. The procedural details of how bags are scanned, flagged, and hand-checked become plot mechanics rather than background noise.

Where It Loses Altitude

The third act falls apart in the way that Netflix action movies often do. The film abandons its tight, contained premise for a sprawling chase across the airport tarmac, complete with explosions and gunfights that belong in a different, louder movie. The shift from psychological tension to standard action fare is jarring.

Sofia Carson's role as Nora is underwritten. She exists largely to give Ethan something to protect, which is a waste of an actor who deserved actual scenes to work with. The supporting TSA crew gets similarly thin characterization.

And the film's central mystery, who the Traveler is and what's in the package, resolves in a way that's competent but not surprising. You'll see the beats coming about 20 minutes before they land.

The Verdict on Carry On

Carry On is a solid 7 out of 10. It's the kind of movie you put on Christmas Eve when the family wants something with momentum, not sentiment. Egerton and Bateman make an excellent pair of adversaries, and the airport setting gives the first two acts a procedural crunch that most streaming thrillers lack. It stumbles in its final stretch, but by then you've already had a good time.

The film closes with Ethan walking out of LAX into the Christmas morning light, badge still clipped to his belt, looking like a man who finally understands what his job is actually for. It's a small, earned moment in a movie that could have used a few more of them.