‘Mayday’ movie review: Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh co-pilot a rollicking bromance through the Danger Zone

John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein send ‘Top Gun’ nostalgia into the Cold War with Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh making a surprisingly winning pair of wingmen

Published - September 04, 2026 12:00 am IST

A still from ‘Mayday’ | Photo Credit: Apple TV

You can tell John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein really miss the ‘80s. After Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the directing duo have taken their latest genre exercise to Apple TV with their new Cold War action-comedy, Mayday.

In 1987, U.S. Navy pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) flies an SR-71 Blackbird over Soviet territory on a covert intelligence mission. The aircraft is shot down, Troy ejects and wakes up miles from friendly territory in the cabin of Nikolai “Nick” Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB operative who has become obsessed with America through contraband VHS tapes, Bruce Springsteen cassetes, an undying affection for Top Gun and the distant promise of McDonald’s. Daley and Goldstein have fun turning those American actioner tropes inside out. The premise is silly enough to be funny on its own, although the filmmakers have the good sense to let the absurdity expose something about the storied mythology they are borrowing.

The duo have spent their filmmaking careers so far refurbishing genre entertainment. Game Night was a surprisingly fresh studio comedy, while Dungeons & Dragons found a generous comic rhythm within the fantasy RPG formula. Mayday takes that fondness for older Hollywood genres back to 1987, when the Cold War still supplied American action cinema with an endless supply of Russians to shoot at and Top Gun turned military recruitment into pop-cultural aspiration. The filmmakers told The Hindu that Tom Cruise’s Maverick was the slick model they wanted to destabilise, and the funniest way to puncture an American action fantasy was to make its hero depend on somebody it taught him to hate.

That gives Branagh an excellent comic playground. His comic timing does much of the heavy lifting here. He can make a pause, a stare or an oddly formal turn of phrase funny because Nikolai takes his own peculiarities completely seriously. Reynolds is perfectly cast for the other half of this joke, but the film has to periodically drag him out from under the accumulated weight of his own screen persona.

The action is considerably stronger than the comedy. Cinematographer Barry Peterson keeps the camera in motion through fights, escapes and vehicle sequences, while the editing gives the film a brisk internal rhythm that prevents its 111-minute running time from becoming cumbersome. The film has a healthy run of set-pieces, from the bar fight, to a train chase, to an apartment escape and finally, the wonderfully excessive ICBM missile chase that dominates the climactic stretch. The closet hideout at a Soviet aristocrat’s dacha is also very entertaining, with Daley and Goldstein wringing an absurd amount of comic tension. And I particularly liked the little driving montage in between all that mayhem, with Troy and Nikolai crossing the changing Soviet landscape set to Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.

A still from ‘Mayday’ | Photo Credit: Apple TV

Though Reynolds and Branagh may be the main attraction, Marcin Dorociński has the most interesting time in the margins, carrying the bruised ideological certainty of a KGB hardliner who genuinely believes the Soviet Union has been humiliated by Gorbachev’s reforms. The Polish stalwart plays that conviction with such restraint that Volkov never feels like the standard Russian henchman dispatched, which makes his occasional flashes of charm all the more unnerving.

But the political ideas are where Mayday starts dropping the ball. Troy’s pathological faith in American exceptionalism gets a useful correction once he has to depend on Nikolai for survival, while Nikolai’s fantasy of America is deflated by the bureaucratic reality of actually getting himself and his daughter out of the Soviet Union. The film clearly wants to puncture the old Cold War binary, but it remains considerably braver when mocking the Soviets than when examining the American system Troy has been trained to worship. Soviet Russia gets populated with grotesques, thugs and assorted human speed bumps, while the film’s critique of American capitalism tends to be conspicuously less explored.

Maria Bakalova’s Anna exposes the problem particularly well. As Nikolai’s estranged queer daughter, she should be the person who turns his romanticised vision of America into an actual moral liability, forcing him to reckon with the family he has endangered and the life he is so eager to abandon. But the writing largely renders her a parcel Nikolai would like to bring across the border, giving Bakalova barely any material worth working with. David Morse fares no better as Troy’s father, a former shipyard worker suffering from asbestos exposure, whose illness briefly punctures the film’s patriotic fantasy with the ugly possibility that American institutions can chew through their own citizens and leave them with the bill. It is a potentially pointed counterweight to Troy’s Soviet-bashing worldview, but both these inconveniently interesting people are left underserved by the screenplay.