An alternate title for Mayday (now on Apple TV) might be Planes, Trains, Automobiles and Nuclear Missile Transport Trucks. And yes, that implies an emotional soft spot amidst the action-comedy melee that is this Ryan Reynolds-Kenneth Branagh team-up. Solid casting and premise, sure, but the true selling point should be filmmakers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, whose Game Night and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves are unjustly underrated, the duo’s whip-smart direction elevating silliness to top-shelf entertainment – which is precisely what Mayday has going for it.
MAYDAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: It’s 1987. Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Reynolds) is a crack, wisecracking Navy fighter pilot who’s sort of a parody of a particular crack, wisecracking Navy fighter pilot from a humongous 1986 movie. Nikolai “Nick” Ustinov (Branagh) is a former KGB spy who surprisingly hasn’t been disappeared yet despite his affinity for all things America, reflected in his most treasured possession, a bootleg VHS of a certain humongous 1986 movie. Now, wouldn’t it be funny if the former crashed in the latter’s backyard, and they became unlikely allies, at first distrusting and then, eventually, less distrusting? In theory, yeah. They’d be like Quaid and Gossett Jr. in Enemy Mine crossed with Martin and Candy, or something.
And so Troy and Nick venture from the thick of the USSR forest, both hoping to vamoose from the country, avoiding a Russian sociopath in a suit (Marcin Dorocinski) – with Springsteen in Nick’s tape deck. As they get into fistfights and shootouts and chases with Rooshyun goons, their characters come into focus via the other characters they love: Troy’s dad (David Morse) is back home with a debilitating illness. And Nick wants to pick up his daughter (Maria Bakalova) on their way to the border, but their estrangement makes it challenging. There will be bickering and bantering. And there will be set pieces, including one with a nuclear missile transport truck. But will there be laughter?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Mayday is a cut or three above other deadly-dud direct-to-streaming buddy-action-comedies like Playdate or The Wrecking Crew. Of course, Mayday also looks significantly more expensive – expensive enough that it likely would’ve done modestly gangbusters in theaters.
Performance Worth Watching: Branagh is not only quite funny – and more nuanced in his characterization of Nick than we might expect from silly movies like this – but game to be the focus of some craftily choreographed fight sequences.
Our Take: Audiences will inevitably be drawn to Mayday for Reynolds, only to find that he’s upstaged by a loose, wily Branagh, as well as Daley and Goldstein’s cracking action sequences. Before anyone can whine that Reynolds’ wiseass shtick has gone stale, you’ll be enamored by the filmmakers’ propensity for incorporating gags and slapstick comedy into their fights and chases, their dynamic camera – yes, there are a couple of nifty oners here – playing with POV and guiding our eyes to visual punchlines, the adrenaline rush spiked with a shot of laughter. It’s a movie set in the ’80s that would feel like it was made in the ’80s if any ’80s action movies had been directed with such wit.
Sure, story-wise, it’s a bit of a whatever, as the screenplay finds minimal dramatic traction in Nick and Troy’s backstories – Morse and Bakalova are given diddley-squat to do – and shoehorns some almost-unearned sentimentality into the third act. And the Russians-are-just-people-trying-to-get-by-too lesson Troy learns, a flimsy riff on the complexities of the era’s Russian-American political rivalry, is cloyingly simplistic. But the goal here isn’t to make a grandiose statement about human relations. No, Mayday wants to crack us up as it plows a nuclear missile transport truck through the heart of Moscow. Mission accomplished.
Our Call: SOS? As in Stream (it) Or Skip (it)? STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
