TL;DR: Mayday pairs a refreshingly restrained Ryan Reynolds with a scene-stealing Kenneth Branagh for a funny, inventive Cold War buddy adventure. Familiar genre bones hold it back slightly, but strong chemistry and playful filmmaking keep this mission firmly airborne.

Mayday has the kind of premise that could have been assembled from a dusty VHS shelf: a cocky American fighter pilot, Cold War paranoia, Soviet territory, mismatched allies and enough geopolitical tension to make everyone reach nervously for the red telephone. Yet writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein aren’t simply trying to resurrect an ’80s action comedy and slap a modern streaming logo on it. Their Apple TV movie uses that familiar machinery to build something warmer, stranger and considerably more self-aware, powered by an inspired pairing of Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh.

Set in 1987, the story follows US Navy pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Reynolds), who is sent on a classified reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory. Things go catastrophically wrong, leaving Troy injured, stranded behind enemy lines and dependent on Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), an ex-KGB operative whose fascination with America makes him considerably harder to categorise than Troy would prefer. Nikolai wants asylum for himself and his estranged daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova), while Troy mainly wants to survive long enough to see home again. That’s all the setup Mayday really needs before hitting the buddy-comedy button and letting two deeply incompatible men attempt to trust each other.

Ryan Reynolds wisely isn’t allowed to Deadpool his way through Mayday

Casting Reynolds as an overconfident American military pilot is almost suspiciously obvious. He has built a substantial chunk of his career around characters who weaponise sarcasm whenever reality becomes inconvenient, and Maydaycertainly doesn’t confiscate his quip licence. The smarter decision is that the film doesn’t make Troy the funniest or most eccentric person in every room.

Reynolds instead plays a more restrained variation of his established persona. Troy’s confidence and wisecracks fit someone who begins the story convinced that he understands exactly how the world works: America is home, the Soviets are the enemy, and everything fits neatly into its assigned faction like a strategy game with conveniently colour-coded units. Putting that personality beside Nikolai gradually exposes how limited that certainty can be. Reynolds’ humour therefore becomes part of Troy’s character rather than simply a machine for firing jokes every thirty seconds.

That distinction matters because audiences have seen enough Reynolds vehicles to recognise the danger. When every character exists inside the gravitational pull of the Ryan Reynolds Persona™, the movie can disappear behind the performance. Mayday avoids most of that problem by making Troy the relatively grounded half of its central partnership. It’s a small adjustment that gives both the comedy and the character somewhere to go.

Kenneth Branagh steals the movie by embracing Nikolai’s glorious weirdness

Branagh gets the juicier assignment, and Mayday is considerably better for it. Nikolai is an intimidating former KGB figure who has spent years isolated from ordinary human interaction, yet he’s also obsessed with American culture and dreams of travelling across the United States in an RV. That contradiction gives Branagh far more interesting material than simply playing the obligatory Soviet tough guy with a mysterious past.

His performance works because Nikolai can be dangerous, sincere and deeply peculiar without those qualities cancelling each other out. Branagh commits to the character’s odd behavioural rhythms rather than treating him as a walking punchline, which makes his interactions with Troy increasingly funny. Reynolds being forced into the role of comparatively normal human being opposite Kenneth Branagh going full eccentric survivalist is exactly the sort of character-class swap I didn’t know this movie needed.

More importantly, the chemistry creates genuine warmth beneath the absurdity. Troy needs Nikolai to get home, while Nikolai needs Troy to provide a possible route towards a different life for himself and Anna. Neither man has particularly good reasons to trust the other initially. Watching that relationship evolve gives the movie an emotional engine beneath all the action-comedy machinery.

The Cold War setting is more than retro wallpaper

Mayday could easily have treated 1987 as an excuse for fighter jets, Soviet uniforms and Top Gun-flavoured nostalgia. Instead, its Cold War setting supports one of the film’s more interesting ideas: enemies are much easier to hate when you’ve never had to recognise them as people.

Troy begins with an uncomplicated understanding of the Soviet Union, and Nikolai immediately makes that worldview inconvenient. The film doesn’t suddenly pretend the political realities surrounding these characters don’t matter. Rather, it separates individuals from the institutions and ideologies surrounding them, allowing its buddy-comedy formula to carry a surprisingly sincere argument about distrust.

Marcin Dorociński’s Alexander Volkov represents the uglier side of that divide. A Soviet security official resistant to the political thaw under Mikhail Gorbachev, Volkov sees the downed American aircraft and surviving pilot as an opportunity to intensify hostility rather than reduce it. He works functionally as the antagonist, although he’s also where Maydaybecomes more obvious about what it wants to say. The friendship developing between Troy and Nikolai already communicates the movie’s point effectively enough that the broader villain mechanics can occasionally feel like somebody activating the quest marker after we’ve already figured out where to go.

Daley and Goldstein are at their best when Mayday gets inventive

Anyone who enjoyed Daley and Goldstein’s Game Night or Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves knows how good they can be at constructing comedy around escalating situations. Their characters don’t merely stand around exchanging jokes; physical circumstances become part of the gag, and solutions tend to create entertaining new problems. Mayday gives that instinct plenty of opportunities to surface.

The film’s strongest stretches come when Troy and Nikolai are simply forced to navigate another seemingly impossible situation together. A sequence involving a train demonstrates the directors’ knack for action-driven comedy, while even much smaller environments can become elaborate comic playgrounds. There’s an energetic visual sensibility behind these sequences that keeps Mayday from feeling like another streaming movie whose coverage was designed primarily around fitting nicely into a thumbnail.

The limitation is that the buddy-action framework is also relatively restrictive. Mayday follows genre rhythms audiences will recognise immediately, and its larger structure isn’t as unpredictable as some of the individual sequences inside it. Daley and Goldstein frequently find inventive ways to complete familiar objectives rather than completely reinventing those objectives. That’s still fun, but it prevents the movie from reaching the wonderfully chaotic heights of their best work.

Mayday understands that familiar doesn’t have to mean lazy

At 110 minutes, Mayday isn’t attempting to rewrite the action-comedy rulebook. Its pleasures are refreshingly straightforward: two charismatic performers, an appealing odd-couple relationship, creative action, Cold War tension and enough emotional sincerity to stop the whole exercise becoming disposable.

That familiarity will probably determine how strongly viewers respond. Anyone exhausted by Reynolds’ particular comic wavelength may still encounter traces of what bothers them, even with the performance dialled back. Viewers looking for a harder-edged espionage thriller may similarly find the film too interested in warmth and comedy. But audiences willing to embrace an old-school buddy adventure should find plenty here, particularly because Branagh gives the formula such an enjoyably unpredictable spark.

There is also something refreshing about a movie that can engage with political division without transforming itself into a two-hour lecture. Mayday ultimately believes human connection can complicate the stories nations tell about their enemies. It delivers that idea through character chemistry rather than abandoning the popcorn entertainment surrounding it, which is exactly where this sort of genre filmmaking tends to work best.

Verdict

Mayday doesn’t completely escape the familiar flight path of the buddy action-comedy, but Daley and Goldstein make the journey entertaining enough that predictability rarely becomes fatal. Ryan Reynolds benefits enormously from playing the straighter half of the partnership, while Kenneth Branagh walks away with the movie through a wonderfully eccentric performance that gives Nikolai humour, danger and genuine humanity.

The Cold War setting also provides more than nostalgic decoration, allowing the film to explore how quickly simplistic ideas about enemies collapse once people actually have to understand each other. Some of those themes become overly explicit, and the conventional genre framework occasionally restrains the directors’ more inventive instincts. Still, Maydaysounds like precisely the sort of confidently entertaining Apple TV movie worth queuing up when you want action, laughs and characters you can actually care about.