Mayday

by Mike McGranaghan

There’s something about a bad comedy that’s especially painful to watch. The directing team of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein hit it out of the park with 2018’s Game Night and did a solid job on 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. This time, however, they’re in over their heads with Mayday, an awkward marriage of mismatched buddy-comedy and high-flying action picture. It’s a chore to sit through.

The story takes place during the late 1980s. Ryan Reynolds plays Navy pilot Lt. Troy “Assassin” Kelly. He’s assigned to fly a black ops spy mission over Russia. When his plane is shot down, Troy is rescued by former KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh). Although their countries are in conflict, Nikolai is obsessed with America, particularly the movie Top Gun. He therefore agrees to help Troy escape by crossing the border, which is inconveniently 2,000 miles away. En route, they stop to visit Nikolai’s daughter (Maria Bakalova) and are pursued by the head of state security (Marcin Dorocinski).

Mayday’s most fundamental issue is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. On one hand, it’s a silly Cold War comedy along the lines of Spies Like Us. There are many, many gags about the differences between America and Russia, as well as the requisite comedic bickering as the guys make their way through a politically dangerous scenario. On the other hand, the film forces in heavier themes like gay people being persecuted in Russia and U.S. troops getting subjected to asbestos. Yes, really. Those subjects are too heavy to mine humor from, and the comedy prevents serious ideas from being explored in anything more than a perfunctory manner.

Daley and Goldstein, who also wrote the screenplay, fall victim to a belief that the more bombastic a scene is, the funnier it will be. Everything is cranked up to ten, made bigger, louder, and stupider than necessary. No chance to reference Top Gun is passed by, and the action sequences are taken to ridiculously extreme levels. It’s not enough that Troy and Nikolai steal a nuclear weapon carrier, for example; they also have to use it in an elaborate chase, with the kind of excess wreckage we routinely get in the Fast & Furious series.

Not even the intriguing casting of Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh works. You can tell Reynolds did some of his notorious script-polishing work, giving himself more of those trademark quips designed to show off his style of ironic detachment. I like the actor, but he really needs to stop playing himself so often. Branagh approaches his role with more sincerity, attempting to bring a realistic quality to Nikolai. Having the stars performing in different modes prevents the developing friendship between Troy and Nikolai from ever feeling authentic.

At the end, Mayday beats the audience over the head with a message about how terrible it is that Cold War tensions made American and Russian citizens think so negatively about each other. Sure, it’s true. The movie has no perspective on it beyond the surface, though. I chuckled two or three times. Otherwise, this misbegotten comedy dies like Goose on the screen.