‘Mayday’ (2026) Apple TV Movie Review - A Polished Buddy Comedy That's Afraid to Go Crazy

With Mayday, directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley make a buddy comedy that initially isn't easy to surrender to, unlike their previous films Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Game Night. Sure, when a bird swooping down from the sky to catch a fish is disturbed by military aircraft passing by at high speed, you are meant, at most, to chuckle at the absurdity of something like this. Yet I couldn't help but take this comic dose with a puzzled face, as if unsure whether it was meant to be effective. I am not sure if I can put my finger on it, but one reason for the lack of immersion could be the unconvincing CGI, which led me to believe that the bird and the fish would suddenly freeze and become a logo for a production company. This, however, doesn't mean that the visual effects elsewhere are unpersuasive. The flight sequences are competently handled, and it's easy to follow the action as it unfolds in the sky. Still, what these scenes don't fill you with is a rush of ecstasy—the excitement, the shudder you feel when you are at an extreme height. Mayday, though, comes close to giving you that "high" when Lieutenant Troy "Assassin" Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) ejects from the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, opens a parachute (which gets destroyed), and falls toward the snowy forest, thereby entering enemy territory.

Troy, you see, is sent to Soviet Russia for a reconnaissance mission (the year is 1987), where, after the crash, he ends up meeting Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), who is ex-KGB. Branagh's presence should be marketed as Mayday's USP. Nothing in the film matches Nikolai's eccentricity. His pure, innocent love for America and American culture makes for a sweet kind of comedy. Nikolai is so in love with an angelic vision of America, its values, its armed forces, and its movies that he has a Top Gun poster in his cabin (Top Gun is frequently referenced in this movie). It's not that hard to believe that Nikolai is so absorbed by America that he intently watches a bootleg copy of Top Gun in which the man recording the film goes to the washroom at one point. All the credit should obviously go to Branagh for bringing the character gloriously to life with charming idiosyncrasy. Nikolai is part-human, part-robotic. When he rescues Troy at a bar by beating down some bullies, he fights almost like Logan Marshall-Green's Grey in Upgrade: he seems to be executing moves based on thousands of calculations performed in a split second, very, very smoothly. In fact, when he tries to stop Troy's escape from the cabin by overpowering him physically, he looks like a machine trained on combat data that can predict his opponent's moves with accuracy.

It's not surprising, then, that Reynolds fails to leave much of a dent alongside his co-star's capabilities. He is fine, though; his sincerity has its own appeal. Together, Reynolds and Branagh seem like a good pair for a buddy comedy, but Goldstein and Daley's sense of humor only works intermittently. There is a nice visual joke involving Troy hidden inside a container, and the climax, with a vehicle carrying a missile wreaking havoc on the streets, comes across as a phallic joke gone wild. But these moments, like all the action scenes, simply look professional and polished. Nothing truly erupts on the screen. Goldstein and Daley have a mild sensibility. They choreograph their scenes with precise timing, though what they fail to do is make them scream and dance and sing. The one time they manage to detonate something is during a sequence in which Troy and Nikolai hide inside a wine closet and are joined by a prostitute, who also ends up hiding with them when the family of a man with whom she was about to have sex arrives unexpectedly.

Even such a scene, unfortunately, can feel a little timid, given that the directors don't take it to either immensely smutty or audaciously comedic heights. Goldstein and Daley's directorial style can be ostentatiously clever and remarkably empty. They embellish their story with plenty of amusements without ever being actually funny. Their movies so far have been diverting but not captivating, well-structured but not inspiring, energetically directed but not sparking curiosity or pushing your adrenaline to the extreme. Mayday is no exception. It growls without going anywhere—it's inoffensive; it's scared to go crazy. In lieu of well-written characters, it delivers mild distractions that comfortably pass the time. The result is an insubstantial experience that quickly evaporates from the mind. Nikolai has a strained relationship with his daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova), which, when resolved, leaves a vapor puff of "sweet feelings" that disperses as soon as the movie cuts to the next scene. Goldstein and Daley, by choosing to mute the heart-to-heart, reconciliatory chat between the father and daughter, only accentuate the overall problem with their style: they peddle undemanding, lightweight sentiments that can be digested easily. The directors essentially don't take great risks. Their "vision" is all PG. Hence, it won't be shocking if Mayday, like Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, ends up being widely cherished. It's engineered to give you a "good time." Its sole purpose is to be comforting. Maybe we should already declare Mayday a hit.