“You can’t swing a Christmas tree at the moment without crashing into one of the many dubious seasonal offerings festooned across the Netflix front page like so much cheap tinsel,” said James Dyer in Empire.
“However, amidst all the saccharine schmaltz and candy-cane cliché, the streamer has also slipped a surprise treat into our stockings in the form of this unexpectedly watchable airport thriller.”
‘Tightly wound’
Taron Egerton stars as Ethan, a security official who is manning the X-ray machine at LAX on Christmas Eve when he is blackmailed into helping a mysterious traveller (Jason Bateman) to smuggle a lethal nerve agent onto a flight. The film mines its “stressful setting for all it’s worth”, and the “serpentine script keeps us on the back foot throughout”. It’s not great cinema, but it’s “thoroughly enjoyable”, and the “undeniable star atop this year’s Netflix tree”.
The characters in this film are all a bit familiar, said Glenn Kenny in The New York Times – “what do you know”, Ethan has a beautiful wife whose life is in jeopardy and who happens to be pregnant with their first child! But “the suspense mechanisms of T.J. Fixman’s script, which support a fat-free running time of nearly two hours, are consistently tightly wound”; and for an actor who has spent his career playing “relatively amiable characters”, Bateman is impressively “loathsome” here.
‘Filling chunk of crude entertainment’
The story makes a few “daft swerves”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph, but “let’s face it”, this isn’t a film to turn to “for strict plausibility”. It’s intended to fill “a quiet Christmas evening on Netflix when we can’t face the cold. On that level, it’s a filling chunk of crude entertainment – as carb-rich and greens-free as the baked potato you’ll probably eat with it.”