‘Carry-On’ Review: TSA Poster Boy Taron Egerton and an Evil Jason Bateman Ground Netflix’s Out-There Christmas Thriller

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The sort of relatably flawed everyday hero who might have been played by Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis back in the ’80s, Ethan Kopek always wanted to be a cop.

Instead, he’s working airport security ¬¬— and not even the essential job of scanning passengers’ baggage for bombs. For the past three years, this dead-end TSA agent’s been stuck somewhere deep in the bowels of LAX airport, doing who knows what, dreaming of a promotion that will never come.

Dumb-fun Netflix potboiler “Carry-On” takes place on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest travel times of the year, and Ethan (Taron Egerton) has picked this moment to prove himself, begging his boss (a surly Dean Morris) to “put me on a machine.” Feeling generous, his supervisor agrees, but this is hardly Ethan’s lucky day.

Within minutes of sitting down at the CT scanner, Ethan finds himself at the center of a low-stakes “Die Hard” knockoff: Someone is trying to smuggle a suitcase full of Novichok nerve agent onboard a crowded passenger flight, and they’ve picked Ethan as the weak link they can manipulate in order to get it past the checkpoint.