“My favorite Christmas movie is Die Hard” is a film bro stereotype at this point, but to be fair, Die Hard is a truly brilliant movie: the screenplay is tight as a drum, and Bruce Willis’ performance as John McClane is the unstoppable force to Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber’s immovable object. It’s so enduring because there aren’t really any other movies like it — not even the sequels.
But that may have changed this year with Carry-On, the latest movie from veteran thriller director Jaume Collet-Serra. It understands what makes the Die Hard model tick, and then builds on it with the perfect claustrophobic setting and a handful of barnburner performances.
Carry-On follows Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), a lowly TSA agent working Christmas Eve at LAX, as he tries to find some career motivation at the urging of his pregnant girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson). When he actually advocates for himself and gets a chance at a promotion, he stumbles into something huge: an earpiece with a mysterious voice (Jason Bateman) on the other end instructing him to let a bag through unchecked or Nora will be murdered.
What follows a classic cat-and-mouse caper showing Ethan wrestling with his own sense of justice while his adversary, referred to only as The Traveler, slowly reveals his true plan: the bag contains Novichok, the real-life nerve agent used in recent assassinations, and he intends to release it on a full flight.
Usually in these action thrillers, the hero is forced to comply with the villain’s demands until a climactic moment where he fights back, but Ethan isn’t like that. He seizes on every moment to find a way around the Traveler’s demands, be that a 911 call, voice-to-text from his smartwatch, or sending a message through the TSA-issued UV pens. He may be stuck in his career path, but he’s never not fighting back, even when he’s doing exactly what he’s told.
Just like in Die Hard, this impeccable push-pull is shown with surprising nuance by the cast. Egerton’s Ethan has the himbo energy you expect from a wannabe cop, but his constant lateral thinking shows he’s far smarter than his lack of ambition makes it look. Even the third act, which takes the fight to the skies, feels shockingly simple, but still impressive and clever.
The secret weapon, however, is Bateman. We rarely see his face, but we don’t have to. His voice sounds so nondescript but bone-chilling at the same time. He’s made a career playing the straight man, and here he takes that to the nth degree, delivering lines about slaughtering hundreds with the same matter-of-factness of someone discussing the weather.
Carry-On is a great Christmas movie because it broaches a subject nobody really wants to think about: the horrifying stress of holiday travel. In this case, the stakes are a lot higher than a canceled flight, making the stress into a captivating thrill. Who knows, maybe the film bros will call this their new favorite Christmas movie.
