“Carry-On” stars an effective Taron Egerton as a TSA Agent named Ethan Kopek, who becomes a key player in a terrorist plot. After a too-long bit in which we meet Ethan’s girlfriend Nora (Sofie Carson), who also works at the airport (of course), and discover that they’re about to have a child, we join Ethan on one of the biggest travel days of the year: Christmas Eve. At his job at a crowded security check-in, he gets handed an earpiece and receives a text ordering him to put it in. A stranger (Jason Bateman) instructs him that he will follow instructions or Nora will die. All he has to do is let a bag through the X-ray machine without raising a red flag. It’s that simple. She’ll live if he looks the other way. Although he knows that means hundreds of others will die.

The script by T.J. Fixman hinges on such a smart concept that it elevates so much of “Carry-On” over its bumpy patches. It’s a classic “What would you do” scenario, a variation on The Trolley Problem really: Would you do something that got your partner, the mother of your child, killed if it meant saving hundreds of innocent lives? At first, Egerton, who can be such a charismatic actor in the right material, felt wrong. Still, he’s consciously choosing to go understated, to let the action around him and the more exaggerated performances do the talking. It’s another sure-to-be underrated turn in the career of a remarkably consistent performer.

And talk they do. In a black coat and hat, Bateman makes a meal out of his villain role. I’d love to see him in more parts like this, exactly knowing the assignment and delivering it menacingly without being overly showy. Collet-Serra fills out the ensemble with excellent character actors, including Logan Marshall-Green, Theo Rossi, Dean Norris, and a fantastic turn from Danielle Deadwyler as the agent who starts putting all the pieces together. Does she do so in a way that radically challenges logical thinking? Of course. But we’ve become a culture that obsesses a bit too much about that kind of narrative nitpicking through reaches for social clout. The truth is that almost all of the best action movies push logic to the side a few times to get the job done, and Deadwyler does some truly heavy lifting to hold some of the more extreme aspects of the film together.