There are movies that want to change your life, movies that want to make you think, and movies that just want to grab you by the collar, shove a Bruce Springsteen cassette into your ear, and scream, “Maverick, baby!”
Mayday, the Apple TV action-comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, belongs squarely in the third category. It's a big, goofy, unapologetically nostalgic slab of Cold War slapstick that wants to remind you of the days when Hollywood believed two mismatched guys, a fistful of wisecracks, and a few exploding vehicles could save the world. And, damn it, sometimes they still can.
It's 1987. Troy Brennan (Reynolds), a cocky Navy fighter pilot with the callsign Assassin, is dispatched on a covert reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory. His supposedly high-tech stealth jet turns out to be about as stealthy as a marching band in a library. Troy crashes in Siberia, parachutes into the frozen wilderness, and wakes up tied to a bed in the cabin of Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), a bearded ex-KGB operative who worships American pop culture with the fervor of a teenager who just discovered MTV.
Nick, as he prefers to be called, loves Top Gun, Bruce Springsteen, and the idea of America. Troy, understandably, isn't buying the hospitality. But when the two discover that Soviet hard-liners are hunting the downed American pilot, they hit the road in a frantic, bullet-riddled scramble toward freedom. Think Midnight Run colliding with Lethal Weapon in a Siberian snowbank, with a little Top Gun fan fiction thrown in for good measure.
The movie's secret weapon isn't its Cold War espionage, its conveniently indestructible vehicles, or its parade of narrow escapes. It's Branagh, who appears to have decided that Shakespeare can wait while he plays a Soviet mountain man with the soul of an American tourist. His Nikolai is a glorious contradiction: a former instrument of state repression who dreams of eating McDonald's and touring the United States in a camper van. Beneath the shaggy beard and exaggerated accent, Branagh finds a wounded humanity that keeps the character from becoming a walking punch line.
Reynolds, meanwhile, does what Reynolds does: he fires off sarcastic one-liners like a malfunctioning machine gun. His Troy is a wisecracking American hotshot whose smugness gradually gives way to something resembling empathy. It's a familiar routine, and sometimes you can practically see the actor's trademark smirk arriving before the joke. But Branagh's eccentric sincerity gives the pairing a spark that neither man could generate alone.
The filmmakers, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, have assembled a greatest-hits playlist of '80s action-comedy conventions, complete with Springsteen needle drops, macho military posturing, and enough Top Gun worship to make Maverick blush. The action sequences are crisply staged, the chase scenes have genuine momentum, and the cinematography gives the snowy wilderness a muscular, cinematic grandeur. As Matt Goldberg observed in TheWrap, the film's visual craftsmanship helps distinguish it from the anonymous, assembly-line aesthetic of so much streaming content.
But nostalgia is a tricky beast. The film wants to celebrate the possibility of friendship across ideological borders while simultaneously indulging in a fantasy of American cultural supremacy. Nick's affection for American pop culture is charming, but the movie sometimes seems more interested in selling the dream of a Big Mac than interrogating the machinery of propaganda that made the Cold War so dangerous. Its more serious threads—Troy's ailing father, Nick's estranged daughter, the political opportunism of Soviet hard-liners—are largely left dangling like loose wires on a cheap Christmas decoration.
Still, there's something undeniably refreshing about a movie that remembers how much fun a good buddy adventure can be. Mayday isn't trying to reinvent the genre, and it certainly isn't interested in subtlety. It's a loud, shameless, occasionally ridiculous celebration of movie-star chemistry and old-fashioned cinematic escapism.
The Cold War may have been about mutually assured destruction, but Mayday is about two guys discovering that the enemy might actually be a friend—and that sometimes the best way to survive history is to outrun it, preferably with a Springsteen song blasting in the background.
It's dumb. It's charming. It's a hell of a good time.