All Ethan Kopek wants is to get through his last shift before Christmas — but fate has other plans. In Jaume Collet-Serra’s new airport thrill ride Carry-On, Taron Egerton plays Ethan, a hardworking TSA agent and aspiring police officer who faces an impossible dilemma: let a dangerous package through security, or watch as a mysterious stranger (Jason Bateman) kills everyone he loves. All in a day’s work? Not quite.

While he may be played by the star of the high-wire Kingsman films, Ethan is anything but an action hero. “Here’s an everyday guy who becomes extraordinary through necessity over the course of a single day,” Egerton told Netflix. “What we kept our eyes on was making sure that we made him feel as relatable and as normal as possible …whatever ‘normal’ is in the extraordinary situation he’s in.”

And just as Ethan is an average airport employee, the nameless Traveler played by Bateman is not the mastermind you might expect. “Both Traveler and Jason Bateman are the everyman,” Collet-Serra told Netflix. “They’re not mustache-twirling, eyepatch-wearing Bond villains you can see coming a mile away. They’re normal guys in normal clothes you could easily strike up a conversation with at a bar.” 

But that doesn’t make this shadowy passenger any less dangerous — and Ethan will need all of his ingenuity to uncover Traveler’s plot and outsmart him once and for all. So seal all your liquids inside a single clear quart-sized bag, and read on for the answers to all your Carry-On questions.

Why does Ethan let the bag through in Carry-On?

“One bag for one life” is the mantra-like offer Traveler repeatedly delivers to Ethan throughout the film. When we first meet Ethan, it’s a regular, if stressful, holiday-season day at the office. But things go sideways when a passenger hands him an earpiece, and the voice in his ear tells him that unless he lets a deadly weapon through security, his pregnant girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) will be murdered. “I think we as humans all like to think that we would rise to the occasion, become the action hero from our favorite movie, and save the day,” Collet-Serra said. “But would that really be true if you knew you could just sit back, do nothing, and guarantee the safety of the person you love the most?”

Of course, Ethan can’t just sit back and do nothing. He makes a series of desperate attempts to stop Traveler’s plot, first calling 911, then conspiring to send a voice-to-text message from his smart watch, and finally using stain remover pen to write a message on a boarding pass to airport law enforcement officer Lionel (Curtiss Cook). All three are foiled by Traveler and his eye in the sky, Watcher (Theo Rossi) — and the final Hail Mary scheme ends with Traveler using a toxin that causes the kindly Lionel to have a fatal heart attack.

These intense problem-solving sequences were deceptively difficult to shoot. Egerton found himself alone on-screen, guiding the audience through Ethan’s plans. “There are quite a few scenes in this movie where Taron is completely by himself, seemingly talking to himself, and it was a lot of long takes with detailed dialogue to shoot,” Collet-Serra said. “It was so impressive watching him take on these scenes with such grace and ease, despite how massively difficult they were to execute.”

How does Ethan get Jason off the X-ray machine?

And for Ethan, things only become more difficult. When his friend and co-worker Jason (Sinqua Walls) takes over at the X-ray machine, Ethan realizes he has to get back on X-ray duty before Jason flags Traveler’s bag and the terrorist orders Nora killed. To do so, he spikes Jason’s coffee with some duty-free liquor, getting his friend fired just in time for Ethan to allow Traveler’s device through security. Ethan catches a glimpse of the boarding pass, accidentally left in a bin, of the passenger who has the bag — the name is listed as Mateo Flores (played by Tonatiuh), destination New York City. 

To Ethan’s fellow TSA employees, it looks like he’s just stabbed his best friend in the back for a promotion. 

“I can fix this,” Ethan assures Jason as his friend is sent home from the job for good. And with the weapon through security and headed to a flight, Ethan’s sure got a lot of fixing to do. 

Is Novichok real?

Fortunately for Ethan, he has a friend on the outside — even if he doesn’t know it. LAPD officer Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler) has uncovered a lead of her own, a damaged bug that lets her make out only one garbled word: Novichok. Cole identifies the word as a deadly Russian nerve agent, and calls in Homeland Security Agent Alcott (Logan Marshall-Green). Spotting the aborted 911 call Ethan placed earlier in the day, the pair work to shut down LAX, although Alcott insists to Cole that there are no threats pending. 

Novichok is indeed a real nerve agent, one of a class of chemical weapons developed by the Soviet Union in the ’70s and ’80s, although the TSA assured the Carry-On filmmakers that the plot they’d scripted isn’t strictly realistic: A deadly biological weapon could never make it through airport security without being automatically flagged. A team of security experts consulted on the film, and put the actors through their paces in preparation for their performances as TSA agents. One consultant, airport police captain Anthony Boisselle, gave the cast training sessions on TSA procedures.

Carry-On is set in Los Angeles International Airport, but the production was filmed in New Orleans. “We took over the old MSY [Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport] in New Orleans and redesigned/decorated it to look like LAX,” Collet-Serra told Netflix. “It was such a thrill to have the whole space at our disposal and be able to explore all these areas of an airport that we don’t normally get to see as passengers.”

For Boisselle, the experience of working on Carry-On was a full-circle joy. “I was a 17-year-old kid working movie premieres as a security person, setting up metal detectors,” he recalls. “I [went] from setting up the red carpet to actually being able to walk on it.”

Who is Agent Alcott in Carry-On?

On her way to the airport, Officer Cole gets a disconcerting phone call, revealing that the man she thought was a Homeland Security agent is actually an impostor (his arm tattoo identifies him as the man who breaks into Ethan’s house earlier in the film to unearth his personal information). After a heated struggle, Cole defeats “Alcott” and commandeers a car to head to the airport, where the TSA, led by Ethan’s boss Agent Sarkowski (Dean Norris) is conducting random sweeps of passenger luggage. In another quick-thinking moment, Ethan adds the name Mateo Flores to the list of random searches, and gets the jump on Traveler in a bathroom showdown, seizing the plastic gun he smuggled through security. 

But the soft-spoken mastermind isn’t done yet. “Traveler isn’t really the petting-the-white-cat, twirling-the-mustache kind of bad guy,” Bateman told Netflix. “He’s a little more like you and me: He’s got a job to do, and he’s going to find a way to do it. That was my approach to it. It’s a bit more modern.” Staring down the barrel of his own gun, Traveler calmly activates the device, meaning Ethan needs to race to rescue Mateo from Sarkowski before the device goes off and kills everyone in the airport. 

It turns out that Mateo can fend for himself — sort of. After Ethan balks at shooting his boss, Mateo seizes a pen and stabs Sarkowski in the neck, killing him. As he does, Ethan realizes that Mateo is also wearing an earpiece. He’s a victim of Traveler’s machinations just as Ethan is: Mateo’s husband is in Traveler and Watcher’s crosshairs.

Sam Lothridge

How does Ethan stop the device in Carry-On?

After defusing the device, Ethan and Mateo set out to dispose of Sarkowski’s body, and Traveler aims to tie off a few loose ends, ordering Mateo to shoot Ethan in the back of the head. But Ethan spots the gun in a conveniently placed mirror, and a heated chase through the bowels of the airport ensues. Sympathetic to Mateo’s plight, Ethan doesn’t want to hurt him. As it happens, it doesn’t matter —  the plastic gun overheats and explodes on Mateo, killing him. With his last breaths, Mateo tries to apologize, but it’s too late: Traveler is approaching, and he wants the bag. Now.

All seems lost as Ethan hands the bag over to Traveler: The device is on its way to a plane, and Watcher is heading to assassinate Nora. But salvation comes from an unlikely source: Mateo’s husband, Jesse (Adam Stephenson), who frees himself from his restraints just in time to kill Watcher with his own sniper rifle. Jesse tells Ethan that the device is in fact heading for Washington, DC: The boarding pass Ethan picked up earlier was an intentional misdirect. 

As Cole pieces together the motivation for Traveler’s plot — military contractors are orchestrating a false flag attack on a traveling congressperson — Traveler picks up a parachute from the same woman who handed Ethan an earpiece at the film’s start. Ethan runs for Traveler’s plane, and sneaks into the luggage hold just in time. 

On the plane, Traveler faces Ethan’s quick thinking for the last time: While still in possession of the case, he swapped it for a slightly larger one, forcing Traveler to send the device to the luggage hold. Upon realizing the device is being disarmed by Ethan, Traveler heads into the hold, where he disables Ethan and mocks him one last time for failing his police academy exam. But Ethan finally gets the jump on Traveler: He’s already removed a vial of the Novichok from the device, and after shoving Traveler into an airtight fridge, Ethan breaks the vial and slams the door shut, killing the “facilitator” in gruesome fashion.

The day is saved, and Ethan reunites with Nora. Officer Cole tells Ethan to give her a call after he’s stitched himself up — and the film jumps forward to the following Christmas. Ethan, Nora, and their new baby are heading through airport security — along with Jason and his family, who have seemingly forgiven Ethan for his makeshift frame job (that must have been a weird conversation). 

After an extraordinary day, Ethan is back to being himself — with perhaps a little bit more confidence. “We’ve seen Taron play such a wide breadth of roles over the course of his career, from a dashing secret agent to a world-famous rock star to a high-profile criminal in prison,” Collet-Serra said. “But we’ve never really seen Taron play an ordinary guy, just an anonymous TSA worker who gets passed by thousands of people every day who don’t give him any extra thought.” In the film’s final moments, Ethan defends a TSA agent facing criticism from an impatient passenger. “Hey,” he says. “She’s just doing her job.” So is Ethan — and based on the final image of his new LAPD officer’s badge, he’ll carry on doing his.

Carry-On is streaming on Netflix now.

The trailer for ‘Carry-On’