Somewhere along the way, Sir Kenneth Branagh developed a knack for playing Russians. He was the vindictive oligarch in “Tenet” and a villainous industrialist in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” but “Mayday” may be the first time he’s been asked to use his very particular set of language skills for … comedy?
His character, Nikolai Ustinov is a United States-loving, ex-KGB agent who has been living a solitary life in the woods until a U.S. Navy pilot crash lands in his backyard.
The year is 1987, Tony Scott’s “Top Gun,” released the year prior, looms large for both servicemen and former Russian agents, and Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) has found himself in a very bad situation after being shot down on a black ops mission in a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird in the heart of the Soviet Union.
Nikolai fights like Jason Bourne, has a beard like Grizzly Adams and loves “Top Gun” with every ounce of his being. Somehow, he’s obtained a bootleg VHS of the movie which he has watched “over 100 times,” he tells Troy. That movie, he says, confirmed “all of my beliefs about your people.” Because of that, he takes it upon himself to help Troy get out of Russia — and thus another mismatched buddy action comedy is born.
Troy is a very quintessentially Reynolds character while also being fairly generic: Snarky and sarcastic and full of himself. In classic “Top Gun” fashion he’s sure he’s the best pilot. He also has a hang-up about faces he deems unpleasant including those of the Cabbage Patch Kids, the pilot leading the black ops mission (it’s one you don’t often see outside of nightmares, he tells him to his face) and a Russian child whose guardians have taken them in for the night. His Reynolds-isms really only work when playing against Branagh, however. It’s hard to say whether anyone intended for Branagh to be the real star of this film, or if that’s just what happened, but he is the one with the arc, with the comedy, with the soul. Reynolds is mainly there to react to whatever Branagh is doing.
Filmmakers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the directing team behind “Game Night” and “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” have made a career out of making genre fare with an irreverent twist. They seem to be both skeptics and fans of macho 80s action movies — playing up the practical hand-to-hand combat and embracing the inherent goofiness of it all.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that it is a strange time to be releasing a movie with a sense of humor about Russia and geopolitical tensions. “Mayday” has a bigger point to make about the one-sided relationship of patriotism, wherever that loyalty lays. And yet it still seems like poor timing to have Marcin Dorociński playing a KGB officer, Alexander Volkov, who is hunting Troy on behalf of the motherland with the zeal of a Terminator. At one point his colleagues, content to wait for help to retrieve Troy’s boot and dog tag from a very tall tree, watch in awe as Volkov strips down to his undershirt to effortlessly do it himself.
Even so, “Mayday” is still pretty fun within its slick and self-aware packaging. It also doesn’t exactly transport you to a credible 1987, though, no matter how hard the soundtrack and references may be working. But in the end, it knows what it is, and that’s not a serious exploration of anything, least of all individuals being used as political cogs during the Cold War.
“Mayday,” an Apple TV release streaming Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “for violence and action, some strong language, suggestive references and smoking.” Running time: 112 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
