Mayday (September 4, Apple TV) is so unintentionally—if, given its title, aptly—distressing that it’s difficult to pinpoint its worst element. Is it the fact that this odd-couple action-comedy features main characters who aren’t actually at odds? Is it its absurd and off-putting Cold War politics, which posit the U.S. as not as great as it thinks it is and the Soviet Union as better than it was portrayed stateside? Or is it the fact that one of our great Shakespearean actors has stooped to Ryan Reynolds’ unfortunate level?
The answer is that it’s all of the above, as Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s follow-up to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is, from every perceivable angle, misbegotten. Without a single witty moment to alleviate its perfunctory (albeit well-staged) centerpieces, and boasting a story rife with laughable USA-USSR equivocations, it’s a mirthless mess whose ideas about 1980s international relations are almost as lousy as the incessant one-liners spouted by Reynolds, who reconfirms that, outside of the Deadpool franchise, his sarcastic schtick only works in small doses.
Troy Kelly (Reynolds) is introduced in 1987 bantering about Cabbage Patch Kids dolls (“If I saw a baby like that, I’d never stop screaming”) as he shows off his peerless talent as a Navy pilot. On the ground, he cares for his ailing dad Harold (David Morse) and tells his comrades, on their night out, that communism “flies in the face of human nature.” He’s a rah-rah patriot of the cockiest order. Thus, he’s the perfect candidate for a top-secret mission to infiltrate Soviet airspace and take photographs of under-construction missile silos.
As it turns out, Troy isn’t flying his spy plane; he’s just along for the ride. And when the craft is shot down, he plummets into a snowy Russian forest. Fortuitously, he’s found and nursed back to health by Nikolai “Nick” Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a bushy-bearded recluse in a flannel shirt and snow pants who resides in a cabin decorated with all sorts of Americana, from postcards of Mount Rushmore to a poster of his favorite movie, Top Gun, which he’s able to watch courtesy of a bootleg VHS tape.
Troy is understandably wary of this stranger, who has him tied up to a bed. However, he soon learns that Nick is a former KGB officer who now pines to visit the home of the free and the brave, where he might indulge in the culinary wonders of McDonald’s.
Despite Nick being an obvious, and miraculous, savior who’s fundamentally on his side, Troy treats his benefactor with the sort of hostility typical of big-screen buddy comedies. This creates a weird friction in Mayday, and so too does the ineptness of its humor and the proficiency of its combat, beginning with Troy’s visit to a watering hole where the locals don’t take kindly to his presence, and Nick is forced to save the day by demonstrating his Terminator-grade butt-kicking skills.
Goldstein and Daley’s fight choreography is top-notch, but their camerawork is dexterous to a fault, soaring, plummeting, and gliding about with look-at-me flair. Their formal showmanship never builds funny momentum, largely because of a script (which they wrote) that’s consistently leaden and ludicrous.
Nick imagines Troy as Maverick and himself as Goose, even though Mayday depicts him as the alpha—a preternaturally composed and capable superman who’s always one step ahead of his adversaries. Chief among them is Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorociński), a stock Soviet monster who wants to use this incident to destroy Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost.
In that regard, Goldstein and Daley’s film paints the Soviets as the nominal villains, and their by-the-books finale—involving a phallic nuclear bomb and Troy’s aerial derring-do—reconfirms that notion. Yet in many other respects, it argues that Troy’s vision of America as the good guys and the Soviet Union as the bad guys is wrong, since the opposite is sometimes true.
On the run, Troy is stunned to find that poor Soviet peasants instinctively take him and Nick in, and the not-quite-sure look on his face when Nick asks if Yankees would do the same is emblematic of the film’s goofy anti-Americanism.
The U.S. embassy’s refusal to rescue Troy (he must come to them for extraction) and unwillingness to grant Nick asylum are additional black marks against the U.S. Nick, meanwhile, is not merely a democracy-craving man of honor, but a father—to estranged daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova)—who’s thrown his career away in the name of tolerance.
By the time Nick testifies in a congressional hearing about his government’s crimes against its own servicemen, Mayday has long since made clear its agenda—which, presumably, is intended as a corrective to the Top Gun fantasy on which it’s riffing.
Of course, Troy ultimately proves to be the true embodiment of his nation’s ideals, with Mayday orchestrating a series of big set pieces on its journey to celebrating him as a real American hero who knows that “the only way to stand for my country is to stand up to it.” Such preachiness would be the killjoy death-knell for the proceedings if it were otherwise entertaining. Alas, Goldstein and Daley’s latest is fatally undone by its protagonists’ DOA dynamic.
No matter how much Troy fumes and fusses about Nick, it’s apparent from the get-go that the latter is a one-in-a-trillion companion who shares his values and goals and has the comic-book abilities to get him to safety. Consequently, their tensions come across as a put-on and amusement never materializes.
Mayday’s high production values suggest a level of quality that’s sorely lacking from its screenplay and performances, with Branagh one-note as the stern and composed Nick and Reynolds grating and corny as the compulsively jokey Troy. Wedging his tried-and-true persona into a vehicle that doesn’t quite suit it, the A-lister strives hard to charm and winds up simply alienating.
As in Free Guy and The Adam Project, Reynolds’ playful acerbity is wearying, both because it makes him sound like every other character he’s played and, more pressing still, because the writer/director duo fail to devise a means of utilizing it to tolerable, much less hilarious, ends.
