For the past ten years, director Jaume Collet-Serra has been working with movie stars, whether in his cycle of fraught, Hitchcockian thrillers with Liam Neeson; Blake Lively’s best-ever performance in the limited-location shark thriller The Shallows; or a pair of would-be blockbusters starring Dwayne Johnson. So, hold up: Does this mean that Taron Egerton, the star of Collet-Serra’s new movie Carry-On, has officially arrived after multiple cracks at star-making vehicles?

Egerton, who hails from an English/Welsh background, has been toplining movies since around the time that Collet-Serra first took up with Neeson. (His last airplane-themed thriller and his second with Neeson, Non-Stop, came out in 2014.) Though his movies haven’t all been lacking in ambition, he’s one of those actors whose sights are clearly set on leading-man stardom; his second-ever movie was Kingsman: The Secret Service, where he played the cheeky bloke turned gentleman superspy Eggsy, a role he reprised in the 2017 sequel The Golden Circle. He also played a sensitive singing gorilla in the animated franchise Sing, a sensitive singing Elton John in the biopic Rocketman, and Robin Hood in a 2018 would-be franchise-starter that flopped. He acquiesced to an American accent in Tetris, one of last year’s spate of product-launch biopics, and takes on that challenge again in Carry-On, which stands out from his filmography for being unlikely to inspire a sequel. It’s just a normal thriller for Netflix, albeit directed with uncommon skill by Collet-Serra.

Egerton’s whole deal so far has vaguely resembled Ewan McGregor Without the Artsy Stuff, and Robin Hood is his only big-budget flop. So why doesn’t he feel like a bigger star? It could have to do the frictionless nature of his signature character: Eggsy, though the anchor of a seemingly well-liked franchise, is often upstaged by the cartoony provocations of director Matthew Vaughn; he doesn’t have the gravitas of even some of the lighter-toned James Bonds, which the movie is obviously riffing on. Even under the tutelage of his mentor (Colin Firth), he comes across as something of a slickly empty suit – a handsome, athletic ruffian doing Bond cosplay. So even when Egerton would go on to throw himself into a part, as he did for the Elton John movie, his performance carried with it the suspicion that maybe he was using his charisma to run some easy laps.

Carry-On makes that underachievement part of Egerton’s appeal, casting him as Ethan, a vaguely underachieving TSA worker expecting a child with his girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson). Rejected from the Los Angeles police academy for pointlessly withheld and overly convoluted reasons, Ethan has been coasting through his security job – a clever dig at what some people think of airport security as well as a reflection of Egerton’s quick-seeming ascent to Kingsman status – and has just started to wake up the possibility of pushing himself when he’s ensnared in an outlandish terrorist plot. A stranger (Jason Bateman), speaking to him through a wireless earbud, tells him that he must let a certain suspicious bag through security, or else people he care about will be killed. An airport-set tight-spot thriller ensues.

It’s a good one, too. Despite his good looks and an athleticism that the movie writes into his character – Ethan is a former track star, and spends much of the back half of the movie in a frantic sprint – Egerton doesn’t overplay the charming-rogue business. Ethan may be coasting, but his desire to do right by Nora, alongside his fear of failure, play as absolutely sincere. Egerton has to deal with everyone’s least favorite part of these ticking-clock thrillers – the “relatable”/emotional backstory – and winds up shouldering it with ease. All told, Carry-On becomes Egerton’s best movie within about 15 minutes.

But it doesn’t feature his best performance. That actually happened over in the world of prestige streaming TV, for the underseen Apple miniseries Black Bird, where he played a charismatic criminal tasked with a dangerous plea deal, trying to pry a confession out of a convicted killer (Paul Walter Hauser) whose case may be overturned – and who authorities think may have far more blood on his hands. Here, as a character who is more explicitly hustling through his screw-ups with fast talk and an easy charm, Egerton really comes into his own. He’s essentially playing someone like Eggsy but with a more realistic fate than getting recruited into using his skills for world-saving, and that context makes all the difference.

Egerton is also, in both Black Bird and Carry-On, playing Americans, which is not the area where fellow U.K. actors like McGregor or Colin Farrell have found their greatest successes. By contrast, Egerton almost seems more at home without his native accent, and his Americanese doesn’t have quite the same flatness that so many of his peers affect when trying to imitate their U.S. cousins. Perhaps Egerton’s Brit connection has been holding him back. After all, if he was truly dedicated, wouldn’t he have done a proper Guy Ritchie movie by now, not just a Robin Hood that seems to wish Ritchie had directed it? Maybe it’s just taken Egerton to realize that spiritually speaking, he’s not totally aligned with his heritage; he’s an American go-getter at heart.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.