It’s an action movie set at Christmas that follows your average Joe (with a little police experience) as he saves countless innocent people, including the love of his life, from a group of villains that are trying to blow them all up.
No, this isn’t “Die Hard.”
This is “Carry-On,” which follows TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) as he battles to save his girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), from assassins led by the Traveler (Jason Bateman), who have threatened to kill Nora if Ethan doesn’t allow a bomb-filled suitcase through security.
When “Carry-On” begins, Ethan is your run-of-the-mill average TSA agent working on one of the busiest days of the year: Christmas Eve. By the end, Ethan’s transforms into a John McClane-esque action hero ready to die defending those he loves, “yippee-ki-yay”-ing it up.
“It’s like a ’90s action-thriller,” Taron Egerton said on TODAY. “I read the script, and I just thought, ‘That’s a movie I want to see.’ The buy-in is immediate. Guy gets an earwig on the busiest day of the year, puts it in his ear and they threaten his girlfriend. It’s such a good set up for a movie.”
Through many twists and turns, Ethan is blackmailed into letting the bomb through security. Not ready to let innocent people die, he takes responsibility for handling the Traveler himself.
Egerton unpacks the wild ending of the movie with TODAY.com, revealing his character’s motivation and thoughts, below.
What happens at the end of ‘Carry-On’?
After a tense and precarious battle in the airport between Ethan and the Traveler, the Traveler makes it onto the airplane, looming the death of everybody on board over Ethan.
But Ethan isn’t going to give up yet. He kicks into action and commandeers a belt loader, quickly steering it down the runway, chasing after the plane getting ready to take off.
Egerton tells TODAY.com that this scene is the only part of the movie that he thinks, “Oh my God, that’s insane!”
Before that, Egerton feels Ethan has acted as best he can in a highly pressurized situation.
“I think that might be the moment when I’m like, ‘Come on, mate! This is feeling a little bit out there now.’ But everything within the airport, I think it’s legit,” he says. “I think he’s doing a good job of dealing with a very stressful set of circumstances.”
Police arrive as Ethan hoists himself into the airplane’s cargo hold. Nora then convinces them that the safest way to save everyone is to put their faith in Ethan’s ability to disarm the bomb mid-flight.
With the pressure of everyone’s life on the flight in his hands, Ethan finds the bomb and switches the controls of the detonator to manual mode.
The Traveler, relaxing in his airplane seat, gets an alert that he can no longer activate the bomb from his phone. He then goes down to the cargo hold to deal with Ethan.
There, the Traveler shoots Ethan in the leg and the ricocheting bullet creates a hole in the cargo hold, causing the pilots to announce they will be returning to LAX.
As the plane begins its downward descent, Ethan shuts the suitcase with the bomb in the cargo hold’s fridge, holding his injured leg.
The Traveler advances on Ethan, saying, “You’re about to die with everyone else on this plane. I don’t even have to shoot you again. All I have to do is nothing.”
The Traveler then grabs the bomb from the fridge, leaving its door wide open and begins to prepare his parachute.
Ethan uses what could be his last conversation before his death to tell the Traveler that the real reason he flunked his polygraph and didn’t make it into the police academy (which had been his dream) was because he lied to cover up a crime his dad committed.
The Traveler says that ever since then, Ethan’s been just like his dad, “A loser, a waste, and asleep.”
“That’s kind of the theme for Ethan of the film, really,” Egerton says. “He’s just found out he’s gonna be a dad and it’s time to wake up and be a grown up.”
He adds that the line also comes from the essence of the Traveler’s character.
“I think it’s the arrogance of Jason’s character, thinking he’s got it all figured out,” he says. “The character is totally unflappable, whereas Ethan is extremely flappable,” leaving this moment as Ethan’s chance to “wake up.”
The Traveler opens the suitcase with the bomb in it, only to discover that one of the cylinders of the deadly nerve agent is missing. But before the Traveler can react, the camera pans to Ethan holding the cylinder as he says, “I guess I woke up.”
Ethan lunges, shoving the Traveler into the open fridge and smashing the cylinder inside it with him.
“Jason has the upper hand for the entire movie,” Egerton says. “I’m like a rat in a trap for the whole thing, so it did feel quite good to finally get my own back and be the kind of winner at the end… it felt good to finally shove him in that fridge.”
Ethan barricades his body onto the door, trapping the Traveler inside as he fights to escape the dispersed nerve agent spreading throughout the air-tight fridge.
“I like to pretend that it’s an industrial, super strength fridge that’s intended for containing deadly nerve agents,” Egerton jokes.
But Ethan holds solid, locking the Traveler in the fridge tightly and looking away as the Traveler’s face gets redder and redder as the poison kills him.
“He had crazy makeup for that,” Egerton says. “He had like four hours of makeup… you barely see it, but he’s got all this kind of pock marking on his face.”
With the villain dead, the plane safely returns to LAX.
Flash forward to happier days
In the aftermath, Ethan and Nora share passionate kisses before the movie flashes forward to where the movie began: the TSA security line.
But this time, Ethan isn’t working. He’s a passenger with his baby strapped to his chest as he, Nora and his TSA friend and his wife head to Tahiti, the couple’s dream vacation the entire film.
The final shot of the film has Ethan dropping his last essential in a bin that will go through the scanner: his own police officer badge, proving that Ethan finally achieved his dream.
“I think there’s that thing of pursuing your dreams and things not being too late,” Egerton says. “And that’s a nice thing to think about Christmas, I suppose.”
What’s in store for Ethan and Nora in the future?
Since the beginning of the film, Nora has been pregnant with Ethan’s baby.
While the flash forward shows the couple happy and flying to Tahiti with their child, one can’t see if there’s a ring on Nora’s finger or not.
“I think they are very settled,” Egerton says. “I think they probably would get married and do the whole 2.5 kids thing.”
He also praises co-star Sofia Carson, saying he “really loved working with her.”
“She’s such a lovely person and brilliant actress,” he says. “If there ever was a sequel… it’d be interesting to see what she’s up to.”
Will there be a ‘Carry-On’ sequel?
Egerton says that if people want a sequel “it would be a really interesting conversation,” adding he would “be open to” it.
“It’s kind of like an extraordinary set of circumstances, so I think it would need a really innovative, creative idea to feel like a worthy idea for a sequel,” he says. “But yeah, why not.”
Egerton adds that sequels “work for ‘Die Hard,’ so who knows?”
Additionally, to add to the long-heated debate, he says that he “100 percent” considers “Die Hard” to be a Christmas movie, noting that it’s one of his favorite films.
Egerton also says that “Carry-On,” which holds similar connections to “Die Hard,” can “absolutely” be a Christmas movie.
“When I watched it, it made me feel super Christmassy,” he says. “So that’s my metric. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
