Mayday

No sense burying the hit on the B-side.

Mayday is every bit what you’d expect—Ryan Reynolds playing Ryan Reynolds in a buddy comedy fueled by ’80s pop-rock and enough Top Gun worship to get an aircraft carrier named after Kenny Loggins. The revelation is Sir Kenneth Branagh who is plugged in as a gloriously oddball Russian agent turned American fanboy, landing with enough action chops to suggest he earned that knighthood in combat.

Does it work?

Hell yeah. Put me in, coach.

In an apparent appeal to the three streaming subscribers who’ve spent the last twenty years under a rock, Mayday opens by giving Troy Kelly (Reynolds) a little backstory to catch those guys up on what kind of character Ryan Reynolds plays in all his movies. We get quips, tender scenes with Kelly’s ailing father (nursing home quips), and then Kelly gets an immediate promotion to play second fiddle to a humorless SR-71 pilot which affords him another target for some quips. All of ten seconds into his first mission flying with Major Snooze, Kelly is shot down and the film’s set up is in place.

Kelly wakes up in the cabin of one Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), who has re-branded himself as the much-more-American Nick. Nick promptly shows Kelly his bootleg of Top Gun, complete with a scene available only to the Russian market where the guy filming the movie screen leaves to the shitter just after Goose dies. Nick’s remote cabin is itself a further shrine of bootleg Americana with movie posters and haphazardly starred American flags dotting the walls.

One failed escape attempt by Kelly later—an introduction to Nick’s fighting side in a bar as he’s rescuing his new American friend—and the two are officially partners in the operation to return/defect to America.

For the rest of the first hour, we’re playing with the boys. The unlikely pair must road trip across rural Russia where Kelly learns that the country is a little bit more hospitable and a lot less cruel than he was told to believe aboard his navy boat. At all turns, Branagh treats the mayhem as business as usual, leaving Reynolds increasingly desperate to speak to Russia’s manager and with plenty of targets for his trademark one liners.

Eventually, the two reach Moscow to find that the American embassy’s returns desk for downed pilots won’t open until morning. They spend the night with Nick’s estranged daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova), who despises her father’s KGB past and the agency’s persecution of LGBTQ people. Kelly engineers a tear-jerking reconciliation between the father-daughter pair, only to receive word from his higher ups in the morning that the bros trip can’t continue all the way to Vegas as Nick won’t be granted asylum by the ambassador.

The obligatory breakup and final-act makeup follow, with Russia footing the bill for the boys’ increasingly destructive couples therapy. The film’s main attempt at an antagonist, Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorociński), is commendably able to avoid becoming cartoonish in defeat, a testament to both his restrained approach and a script from writer/director pair John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein that doesn’t rely on him to provide a whole lot of obstacles. And after a tour through some of Moscow’s more hilarious transportation options, the whole thing lands safely aboard the USS Entertaining, thanks to its smooth pacing and Branagh’s obvious delight in both the movie he’s making and the glorious weirdo he’s been hired to play.

Credit Daley and Goldstein for remembering that a well-built, evenly paced action comedy is a perfectly respectable destination. That discipline leaves Branagh free to hijack the movie without crashing it. And leaves the rest of us recommending Mayday instead of shouting it three times into a radio.