A tenaciously written 2024 action thriller that redefined several reputations lifts off on streaming

Regardless of whether or not he carries the Wolverine torch forward after Hugh Jackman’s 91st birthday, Taron Egerton is the truth, and Taron Egerton is the moment. Indeed, from Rocketman to Tetris to the Kingsman and Sing movies, everything this man touches glows that much brighter than it otherwise would have.

This is especially true for his latest outing, Carry-On, where he’s tasked — alongside an against-type, villainous Jason Bateman — with carrying a sharply-executed script with all the fast-paced fervor and emotional subtleties that the story aims for. It was a well-hedged bet, because not only does the film stand with Rebel Ridge among the streamer’s actioner greats, but people have taken notice as a result.

Per FlixPatrol, Carry-On is soaring as the top film on the Netflix film charts in the United States at the time of writing. Among its competition is Blake Lively’s controversy magnet It Ends with Us, Lindsay Lohan’s decidedly uncontroversial Our Little Secret, and We’re the Millers, which also features an against-type actor named Jason, if only because we can no longer see him as anyone other than Ted Lasso.

Carry-On stars Egerton as Ethan Kopek, a TSA officer who has a child on the way with his girlfriend Nora, and who feels insecure about his lack of progression in his professional life. He gets his big break when his manager allows him to do a trial run on a bag scanning machine on Christmas Eve, but it eventually devolves into a nightmare when he’s blackmailed by a mysterious traveler (Bateman) into letting a deadly nerve agent through security. Suddenly, Ethan has a lot of choices on his hands, and the ones he doesn’t make might be just as important as those that he does make.

Carry-On is a textbook example of tension-centric writing, not only because its airport setting is claustrophobically cinematic, but because Egerton and Bateman play such a delicious psychological long game with each other. From the drop, Ethan and his adversary share a malicious and aggravating intimacy; the men’s individual frustrations, impatience, and anxieties manifest quite clearly in the other, and — especially when they come face-to-face near the beginning of the film — it’s always clear how much further they both know they have to go before this conflict is resolved one way or the other.

Then there’s the matter of the unique setup-and-payoffs that Ethan and the Traveler bring to the table. Ethan will do something to interfere with the terrorism, but it’s not always immediately apparent how his actions will cause that interference, and so when that “how” is ultimately revealed down the line, it’s that much more satisfying. The Traveler, meanwhile, counters Ethan’s schemes with murderous power dynamics that resets the tension whenever we can taste the payoff, further piling on the satisfaction for when we do get that release of tension.

From there, consider the fact that these two men are, in several twisted ways, working together and cooperating, and it should be clear that of all the triumphs that Carry-On can lay claim to, the construction of its pulse-pounding puzzle is among its finest. Bateman’s bad guy and the simple fact that Netflix made a good action thriller are other such contenders.