‘Carry-On’ gives Taron Egerton a luggage disaster in exclusive first look

Working for the Transportation Security Administration is a thankless job, especially during the holidays. Delayed, canceled, rerouted, and overbooked flights tend to bring out the worst in people. Add on the sometimes never-ending wait times through security, and it can turn even the best of us into the worst of us. TikTok is a living archive of our darkest airport moments, forever updating with new content.

Nothing, however, compares to the customer Taron Egerton‘s TSA agent must deal with in Carry-On, the upcoming thriller from Black Adam and Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra, who also brought us previous onscreen travel-related nightmares The Commuter and Non-Stop.

Entertainment Weekly‘s exclusive first look at the film depicts Egerton, an Emmy nominee for Black Bird and Golden Globe winner for Rocketman, as Ethan, a TSA agent who’s contacted by a mysterious traveler, played by Jason Bateman (Ozark, Air).

If manning the X-ray machine at the airport during the holidays isn’t stressful enough, this unidentified gentleman makes things exponentially worse. The terrorist blackmails Ethan into letting a particularly dangerous carry-on package slip through the scanner and onto a Christmas Eve flight, endangering the lives of everyone on board and in the airport.

“I think he’s someone who lacks a sense of drive and direction but is ultimately really resourceful and capable. He’s a bit of a hero in waiting,” Egerton tells Entertainment Weekly over email. “He’s pretty noble and selfless. He has all the qualities of an archetypal hero underneath the lack of direction.” 

When we first meet Ethan, Egerton says, “He’s unhappy at work at the airport and feeling flat and dejected about it. He’s also just found out his girlfriend is pregnant. So, he feels pressure to be a responsible father and provider, but I think he also feels a deep lack of fulfillment. So when he’s put in this terrible situation, he has a huge occasion to rise to.”

“Ethan is a relatively ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation, and how he adapts and grows to save his loved ones over the course of the film ends up making him pretty extraordinary, even though what he discovers is that being extraordinary is actually just being himself,” adds Collet-Serra.

Carry-On is written by Michael Green of the Kenneth Branagh-led Hercule Poirot movies (and Collet-Serra’s Jungle Cruise) and T.J. Fixman, whose last film or TV credit was the 2016 animated Ratchet & Clank movie, based on the video games.

Joining Egerton and Bateman among the cast are Sofia Carson (as Ethan’s girlfriend whose life is threatened by the terrorist), Danielle Deadwyler, Sinqua Walls, Logan Marshall-Green, Theo Rossi, Josh Brener, and Dean Norris.

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Carry-On will drop on Netflix this Dec. 13, just before many of us brave the nightmare of the airport. Guess airline travel could be worse!

See more exclusive first-look photos below.