‘Mayday’ Review: A Cold War Buddy Comedy That Knows Exactly What It’s Doing

‘Mayday’ drops Ryan Reynolds into a frozen Soviet wilderness circa 1987 and pairs him with Kenneth Branagh for what amounts to a loving throwback to the kind of scrappy action comedy that used to fill theaters before streaming took over. The setup is simple enough. A hotshot Navy pilot gets shot down on a covert mission over Russian territory and ends up depending on the last person he expected, a weathered former KGB man who has spent years quietly nursing an obsession with American pop culture out in the snow.

Apple has been building a habit of dropping these mid budget star vehicles directly onto its platform, and ‘Mayday’ fits that pattern almost too neatly, arriving with the kind of starry cast that once guaranteed a summer weekend at the multiplex. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who wrote and directed the film, clearly grew up on the same tapes their Russian hermit character worships, and it shows in every beat of the pacing and every needle drop.

What actually makes the movie work has less to do with Reynolds than you would expect. Branagh is the reason to show up, playing his exiled agent with a shaggy beard, a battered VHS collection, and a wounded sincerity that turns what could have been a broad joke into something genuinely endearing. He handles the physical comedy and the sudden bursts of violence with equal ease, and there is a real sense that he is savoring every scene, which makes the film’s best moments land harder than the script alone deserves.

Reynolds, for his part, is doing the version of himself audiences have seen many times over by now, all quips and raised eyebrows and a general reluctance to color outside his own established lines. It works fine here because the character is built to bounce off Branagh rather than carry the film solo, and the chemistry between the two of them is real enough to paper over how familiar the jokes can feel. When the two leads are trading barbs in a frozen shack or improvising their way past Soviet patrols, the movie hums along nicely.

The plotting itself borrows liberally from decades of odd couple espionage stories, and anyone who has seen a handful of Cold War thrillers will clock most of the turns well before they arrive. Maria Bakalova and Marcin Dorociński fill out the supporting cast with enough conviction to keep the stakes from feeling entirely weightless, even when the film leans hard into its comedic instincts during sequences that probably should carry more tension. The action itself is more competent than inspired, staged with a clean, functional style that never quite reaches the giddy highs the central pairing suggests it could.

Where ‘Mayday’ ultimately lands is as a perfectly enjoyable Friday night watch rather than anything that lingers much past the credits. It never tries to reinvent the genre it is so openly indebted to, and that modesty ends up being both its charm and its ceiling. I found myself smiling through most of it thanks entirely to Branagh, while wishing the script had trusted its stranger instincts a little more instead of settling into such comfortable, well worn rhythms.

Judged purely on how much fun it is to sit through, ‘Mayday’ earns its place as a solid, breezy entry in Apple’s growing pile of starry originals, even if it never threatens to become anything more ambitious than that. The chemistry between its two leads carries real weight, the Cold War setting gives it just enough flavor to stand apart from generic buddy fare, and the jokes land more often than they miss. I’m landing on an 8 out of 10.

Let me know in the comments whether Branagh’s performance won you over as much as it won me over, or if ‘Mayday’ felt a little too familiar for its own good.