Armed with enough competence to make it sufficiently entertaining and entirely forgettable, Carry-On joins the ranks of Don’t Look Up, Bird Box, and Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire as Netflix’s yearly holiday offering to bide your time for the few hours between opening presents and eating Christmas dinner. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery still reigns supreme in this hyper-specific genre, one that’s seen its fair share of big-name actors climb the yearly viewing charts. Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, Sofia Carson, and Danielle Deadwyler are the quartet up to bat this time in a story that almost all of us can relate to: Airport travel during the holidays absolutely sucks.

But the suckage that this cast goes through pales in comparison to the average person like me and you. For starters, Ethan Kopek (Egerton) hates Christmas. I know, boo him! It’s a yearly reminder he’s not doing enough, like being a lowly TSA officer when he originally applied to the police academy. There’s also the surprise that his girlfriend Nora (Carson) gave him the gift of a positive pregnancy test. Oh, and a mysterious terrorist (Bateman) is threatening to kill Nora and everyone in the airport if Ethan doesn’t let a bomb slip through security. They say holiday-related stress can kill you, but I didn’t think it would be this aggressive.

With a setup such as this - a law enforcement protagonist unluckily taken out of his element during the holidays by a calm and collected terrorist, one that will kill everyone he loves if they don't get their way - it doesn't take much media literacy to see the parallels between this story and Die Hard. Similarly to that action classic, our hero and villain don't speak face-to-face for a prolonged period of time. A Bluetooth earpiece acts as their mode of communication, the terrorist walking Ethan through every step as he sits at his security terminal.

Lyle Vincent's camera keeps a shallow focus throughout these proceedings, pushing in on Egerton as he processes his limited options. Bateman's voice acts as sinister ASMR, although there's some playfulness in his casual demeanor about the whole thing. He's technically not a terrorist, just a "facilitator" performing a job for a high-paying client. It’s fun to see (and hear) the actor possess a character with callousness, with years of playing the straight man in whacky comedies prepping him for this descent. I also say that with full awareness not having seen Ozark has totally skewed my perception of him.

Egerton is a capable lead, although his stressed and straighter-laced demeanor takes away a lot of his charm and makes him the least fun character in this cast. He’s at least served well by director Jaume Collet-Serra, who made a name for himself as the continuer of the post-Taken Liam Neeson action renaissance that saw him kick ass on planes (Non-Stop), trains (The Commuter), and automobiles (Unknown). There are no less than a handful of shots of Egerton sprinting throughout the airport terminal, dodging the scope of a sniper rifle and the suspicions of his coworkers as he tries to piece together this ticking bomb of a puzzle.

Less catered is Danielle Deadwyler, the LAPD cop, in an overly stretched subplot, where she’s also on the hunt for this facilitator. A horrendously CGI car crash set piece is her one moment of physicality, a far cry from the more inspired chases within the chutes and ladders within the baggage claim machinery. More moments of visual eyesores such as that, and some heavy-handed Christmas needle drops make Carry-On too cheap, predictable, and anonymous to buddy up to the holiday action films it so desperately wants to impress.