Mayday Review: Reynolds and Branagh Make a Cold War Buddy Movie Work

Apple TV is putting Mayday on the service today, September 4. That is a Friday dump for a movie a lot of critics spent the week saying should have opened in a mall. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein directed it. They are the Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves pair, which is the useful fact, because Mayday is built like their other work: two people who should not share a car, then a lot of cars.

Ryan Reynolds plays a Navy hotshot. Kenneth Branagh plays the retired KGB hermit who fishes him out of Siberia. If you already know you will not watch another Reynolds quip picture this year, this one will not convert you. If you have been waiting for Branagh to stop doing prestige and start kicking people, the early notices are not lying. The Guardian called the chemistry wacky and the Moscow car pileup a Roger Moore hangover. Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times called it a summer movie that showed up in the dog days, under two hours, and more interested in getting you out of the cabin than in teaching you the Cold War.

I came in expecting a streaming original that apologizes for not being Top Gun. It does not apologize. It just borrows the poster and then spends the rest of the runtime on a two-hander in the woods.

The plot is a stealth jet and then it is not

Reynolds’ Troy gets picked for a covert photo run over secret Soviet bases in a stealth jet that, as McNamara puts it, is not as stealthy as advertised. He barely gets the pictures. He ends up under a parachute in Siberia. He wakes tied to a bed in a cabin. The man in the cabin is Nikolai Ustinov, who asks to be called Nick. Branagh plays him as a Russian Grizzly Adams who has watched Top Gun enough times to have opinions about it. That is the joke the movie is willing to repeat, and it is a better joke than the jet.

From there the film does the thing these films always do. The cabin could have turned into a trap. The Guardian even floats Misery and the Waugh novel where a man is forced to read Dickens forever in the jungle. Then Troy and Nick run. Cars. A train they will have to jump. An aircraft that becomes a bad idea once people start shooting inside it. Marcin Dorociński plays Volkov, the hard-faced security man behind them. You can outline this on a napkin. The napkin would be accurate and also useless, because the movie is not hiding a third-act idea. It is hiding whether two actors can make a chase feel like a conversation.

Daley and Goldstein have done this math before. Game Night works because the couple is funnier than the plot. Honor Among Thieves works because the party is funnier than the dungeon. Mayday works, when it works, because Branagh is funnier than Reynolds’ default setting, which is a weird sentence to type and also the reason to hit play.

The 1980s wrapping is costume and needle-drops and a glasnost-era wish that Americans and Soviets might share a cigarette after trying to kill each other. McNamara flags that sentimental subtext. It is not subtle. It does not need to be. A movie this silly would get worse if it suddenly wanted to be The Hunt for Red October.

Branagh is the buy-in

Reynolds can do this part in his sleep, and sometimes he does. The Deadpool cadence is a known quantity: narrate the danger, undercut the danger, punch. Mayday needs that only as a starter motor. The actual engine is Branagh deciding that a Shakespeare guy in a beard can throw a roundhouse and still look like he is enjoying the research.

The Guardian’s reviewer sounded genuinely surprised that Branagh can do close-quarter fights. I was too, and I have watched him do enough theatrical physical comedy to have guessed. The difference is commitment. A lot of prestige actors slum in action by winking at the stunt team. Branagh looks like he asked for extra takes. That enthusiasm is what McNamara means by infectious. You can feel when a set was a good time. You can also feel when a set was a contractual obligation. This one was a good time.

Nick is a hermit who loves American junk culture enough to make Troy uncomfortable in his own nationality. That is the odd-couple lever. Reynolds usually plays the chaotic one against a straight man. Here the straight man is an ex-KGB recluse with a VHS religion, so Reynolds has to play the American who is suddenly the boring professional. It is a small inversion and it is the whole movie. If you do not like watching two men insult each other while running, you will be checking the runtime at minute twenty. If you do, the insults are the plot.

Dorociński’s Volkov is the cost of this structure. He is a pursuer because the script needs a pursuer. He is not a character you will quote. The Hollywood Reporter notice excerpted by 9to5Mac called the film an entertaining diversion that makes you hope for the hinted sequel. Sequels are how you admit the villain was a sketch. I would watch a sequel for Nick, not for Volkov.

There is an unexpected queer current the Guardian flags without turning the review into a culture-war paragraph. I will follow that lead. It is there, it is not the marketing, and it is more interesting than another speech about peace. Buddy movies have always been one bad edit from a romance. Mayday does not run from that. It also does not stop the movie to explain it. That is the correct ratio.

Action as timing, not as hardware

The jet is a first-act toy. After the crash you get fistfights in tight rooms, then vehicles, then the train, then the plane again because these movies are legally required to leave the ground twice. The Guardian compared the Moscow driving to Moore-era Bond, which is a polite way to say the geography is a video game and the physics are optional. I do not mind. Practical-looking chaos in a streaming comedy is rarer than another drone shot of a desert.

What I mind, a little, is how often Reynolds talks through a stunt that would play cleaner without the caption. Goldstein and Daley know how to stage a gag around a fight. They did it in Game Night without a superhero cadence. Some of Mayday’s brawls would be funnier if Troy shut up for ten seconds and let Branagh’s body do the joke. When that happens, the movie jumps a grade. When it does not, you are watching a very expensive podcast with stuntmen.

The film stays under two hours. That is not a small mercy. Apple originals have a habit of arriving at 125 minutes because someone confused streaming with a director’s cut. Mayday leaves. The last act is noisy and a bit of a pileup, which is what you get when you stack a train and a plane and a city chase because the outline had empty boxes. I still prefer a pileup to a coda where the characters discuss What We Learned In Siberia.

If you liked Mutiny for knowing the exact size of its ambitions, this is the comedy version of that instinct. Statham movies tell you what they are in the title sequence. Mayday tells you in the first cabin scene: two men, one rifle, no dignity.

A Cold War movie that does not want your thesis

Set it in 1980s Soviet Russia and you invite people to grade the politics. Grade the costumes instead. The movie wants Top Gun’s appetite and a buddy-comedy’s morals. McNamara’s “pro-glasnost, hands-across-the-water” line is accurate and also the ceiling. Nobody here is doing a revisionist history of Afghanistan or a lecture on NATO. The KGB guy likes American movies. The American guy needs the KGB guy to not freeze to death. That is the international relations.

I would rather a movie be this shallow on purpose than deep by accident. Accidental depth is how you get a streaming thriller that thinks a torture scene is theme. Mayday would rather jump off a train. The 80s are a color grade, a needle-drop budget, and a reason for Branagh’s accent to have somewhere to go. If you need your Cold War fiction to hurt, this is the wrong title. If you need it to move, it moves.

Apple’s movie slate is still the side dish next to Ted Lasso and the sci-fi shows. 9to5Mac said as much while noting that originals are piling up. The Dink already proved Apple will fund a comedy that looks like a theatrical mid-budget and then hide it behind a login. Mayday is that strategy with movie stars. Critics keep saying it should have been in theaters. They said similar things about Coyote vs. Acme, another film that had to argue for its own existence after the business around it got weird. I am tired of that sentence. A good streaming comedy is allowed to be a good streaming comedy. The argument about windows is a studio problem. It is not a reason to pause the movie.

Would Mayday play with a crowd? Yes. The fights are big enough. The jokes are loud enough. A Saturday night multiplex would have helped the car chase, because engines want brick walls. Watching it on a laptop will shrink the mayhem and leave the two-hander intact. The two-hander is the part I will remember.

What the reviews agree on, and where I peel off

JoBlo called it the best movie not hitting theaters this year, which is the kind of line you write when you want a pull quote and also when you have seen the rest of the streaming pile. Empire said the buddy-comedy action checklist is met, plus a little more. The Hollywood Reporter liked the mismatched leads and floated a sequel. That cluster is coherent. Nobody is calling it a masterpiece. Nobody is calling it junk. The band is “this works.”

I land in that band with one asterisk. The “little more” is Branagh, not the script. The script is a professional delivery system for two performances. When people talk about a theatrical release, they are talking about the money those performances might have pulled on a poster, not about some secret art film hiding in the Siberian second act. There is no secret art film. There is a very good Nick and a Troy who gets better the less he sounds like Deadpool.

If you are grading action craft, it is mid-tier-plus: readable geography in the cabin and the early chases, then a finale that starts stacking toys. If you are grading star comedy, it is high. If you are grading Cold War fiction, close the spreadsheet.

I would put this on a Friday with food. I would not put it on a list of 2026’s serious spy movies, because it is not trying to be one. The useful comparison is not Tinker Tailor. It is the evening you wanted a Bond and got a Moore, and then realized you were in the mood for Moore.

Apple wanted a fall title that is not another prestige miniseries. Mayday is that title. The stealth jet is junk by minute twenty, and the rest of the movie is two actors making the junk irrelevant.