Netflix has just given its Die Hard this Christmas.

Die Hard‘s status as an action classic is a matter of settled law, but its place in the pantheon is troubled by a contentious debate that resurfaces every year around this time: Is it a Christmas movie? To multi-year disputestarted by an innocent Slate post 17 years ago, may not be very serious, but it has a way of working its way into every understanding of the unpretentious gem of a film, one whose effortless craft can seem, after decades of steroid-inflated star vehicles, like the work of a medieval craftsman whose techniques have been lost to time.

Luckily for those craving some meat and potatoes between their Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas ham, Jaume Collet-Serra’s Hand luggage hits the spot. The premise that Die Hard‘s, is almost comically simple: Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton), a TSA agent working at a busy airport on Christmas Eve, must thwart a mysterious caller’s plan to sneak an ominous black suitcase onto a plane without alerting the authorities or endangering the life of his pregnant girlfriend, who is fixed in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. There’s a sprinkling of character development, built around the idea that Ethan, once an aspiring cop, has settled for a dead-end job at the lowest level of public safety and now finally has a chance to redeem himself. But the film knows better than to take it too seriously, or to ask Egerton to do more than the occasional frown or flex his biceps. And lest anyone be tempted to start an argument about whether or not it’s a holiday movie, Hand luggage‘s first scene ends with the bad guy setting fire to a batch of Christmas trees.

The Die Hard model thrives on confinement, but given that Collet-Serra’s The Shallows stranded Blake Lively on a single rock in a shark-infested sea for a good portion of its runtime, an airport might as well be a football stadium. (Die Hard‘s own sequel, set in Washington Dulles International Airport, suffered from the fact that it’s harder to create a sense of captivity when your location covers several square miles.) Hand luggage‘s script, by video game writer TJ Fixman, tries to isolate Ethan even when surrounded by thousands of nervous travelers. Shortly after an ill-timed push for job advancement has him riding the X-ray machine on his first day, a wayward earwig appears on the conveyor belt, which an anonymous text advises him to start listening to, or else. With access to the airport’s network of security cameras, the man on the phone (played by Jason Bateman, and identified in the credits only as Traveler) and his rifle-wielding accomplice (Theo Rossi) can see everything Ethan does or tries to do, meaning that any attempt to sound the alarm or deviate from their plan could get him or his girlfriend (Sofia Carson) or just about anyone else killed. The safest place for him to be would be alone, but there is no day and no place more difficult to achieve than an airport on December 24th.

Made for a modest $47 million, Hand luggage doesn’t have show-stopping sets – unlike Ethan’s Mission: Impossible namesake, this one isn’t going to save the day by clinging to the outside of a jet plane or scaling the world’s tallest skyscraper. (His last name is a clue to the stakes; it’s the Russian equivalent of a crown.) But Collet-Serra is the kind of director inspired by constraints rather than hampered by them. His one big budget movie, Disney’s Jungle cruiseis his least funny by a long shot, but give him Liam Neeson and a couple of commuter-train cars and you’re in heaven. There is one major misstep, a car crash staged as a steady shot through the windshield, transparent digital fakes of which stick out like a stuffed animal on a baggage carousel. But by and large it’s a no-frills affair, and that’s nice.

Hand luggage opens with the DreamWorks logo and like Netflix’s Rebel Ridgeit’s a film that would have been a joy to see in the theater before it took its rightful place as a living room favorite, to be watched or half-watched over and over again. So many of Netflix’s original movies have been woefully overpriced or bottom-of-the-barrel flops, but it would be nice if this little boomlet in back-to-basics filmmaking meant the streamer could be a driver for more like this : clever spins on classic set-ups, executed with integrity and the occasional flash of intelligence, but never too far from the elemental satisfactions of big genre films. Leave a hundred Hand luggagep flourish.