Mayday feels like somebody found a lost 1980s studio comedy, polished the action with modern technology and somehow convinced Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh to share the cockpit. That is both the joke and most of the appeal.
A Cold War mission with buddy-comedy DNA
Reynolds plays U.S. Navy pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly, whose secret mission into Russian territory goes catastrophically wrong. Stranded behind enemy lines, he encounters Nikolai Ustinov, Branagh's gruff former KGB agent with an unexpected fascination with American culture. From there, the film becomes less interested in geopolitical seriousness than in watching two very different performers learn how to occupy the same adventure.
Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein know this kind of chemistry-driven comedy. The action is important, but the real engine is personality. Reynolds' rapid delivery can become exhausting when a movie lets him run without resistance; Branagh gives him exactly the resistance he needs.
The 1980s are not subtle
The period setting, music and Top Gun-adjacent energy are impossible to miss. Sometimes the references feel less like texture and more like the film nudging you in the ribs. Still, there is a sincerity to the throwback. This does not feel embarrassed to be an old-fashioned buddy movie.
I appreciated that more than I expected. Not every action comedy needs to deconstruct itself. Sometimes two incompatible men, a dangerous mission and a collection of escalating problems are enough.
Where the formula shows
You can predict several emotional turns well before the characters reach them, and the Cold War backdrop is deliberately cartoonish rather than historically probing. Viewers looking for a serious espionage thriller are in the wrong aircraft.
Branagh is the secret weapon
Reynolds is operating in a comic register audiences know extremely well, which makes Branagh's presence more important than it first appears. Nikolai does not merely wait for Troy's jokes; he changes their rhythm. The contrast between Reynolds' restless verbal energy and Branagh's heavier, more deliberate delivery gives the movie a comic shape it would otherwise lack.
The pairing also helps the action. Buddy movies need disagreement because agreement kills momentum. Every plan becomes more entertaining when two capable people have completely different ideas about what competence looks like.
A throwback that knows it is a throwback
There is no mistaking the film's affection for 1980s action cinema, and sometimes that affection becomes over-insistent. Yet the practical pleasure of the formula survives: a mission, a hostile landscape, escalating obstacles and two men who would rather argue than admit they have started trusting each other.
Mayday is not trying to reinvent geopolitical comedy. It is trying to recreate the feeling of a movie you might have discovered on television years ago and then watched every time it appeared. That modest ambition turns out to suit it.
Verdict
Mayday works because Branagh and Reynolds make the familiar feel lively. Daley and Goldstein understand the specific pleasure of a buddy movie: the mission gets us into the room, but the argument about how to get out is why we stay. It is knowingly old-fashioned, occasionally overcooked and very easy to watch.