Taron Egerton’s airport thriller is ‘unexpectedly watchable’

When you purchase through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

“You can’t swing a Christmas tree these days without bumping into one of the many dubious seasonal offerings plastered across the Netflix cover like so much cheap tinsel,” said James Dyer in Empire.

“But amidst all the saccharine schmaltz and candy cane cliche, the streamer has also slipped a surprise into our stockings in the form of this unexpectedly watchable airport thriller.”

‘Tightly Wounded’

Taron Egerton stars as Ethan, a security officer manning the X-ray machine at LAX on Christmas Eve when he is blackmailed into helping a mysterious traveler (Jason Bateman) smuggle a deadly nerve agent onto a plane. The film mines its “stressful setting for all it’s worth” and the “serpentine script keeps us on edge throughout”. It’s not great cinema, but it’s “thoroughly entertaining” and the “undeniable star at the top of this year’s Netflix tree”.

The characters in this film are all somewhat familiar, Glenn Kenny said in New York Times – “what do you know”, Ethan has a beautiful wife whose life is in danger and who happens to be pregnant with their first child! But “the suspense mechanisms of TJ Fixman’s script, which underpin a fat-free running time of almost two hours, are consistently tightly wound”; and for an actor who has spent his career playing “relatively lovable characters,” Bateman is impressively “despicable” here.

‘Fills a part of raw entertainment’

The story takes a few “stupid turns”, Tim Robey said in Daily Telegraphbut “let’s face it”, this is not a film to turn to “too strict plausibility”. It’s meant to fill “a quiet Christmas Eve Netflix binge when we can’t handle the cold. On that level, it’s a filling morsel of raw entertainment — as high-carb and veggie-free as the baked potato you’re likely to eat with it.”