I had one of the biggest laughs in my life watching Mayday, the Apple TV spy comedy from the duo of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. The scene comes fairly early, as Kenneth Branagh’s burly, grizzled ex-KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov is fighting off swarms of Russian goons in a pub. Nikolai is comically unstoppable; they can’t lay a damn glove on this old guy who looks like he should be his grandkids some candy not sliding around like Floyd Mayweather. And I’m not sure if the scene is genuinely funny or not, it’s just so damned stupid and ridiculous that I burst into a fit of laughter that lasted literally for minutes.
I thought about why that scene was so funny to me, and it’s that it reminded me, fondly, of the absurdist Zucker/Abrahams movies that I loved in the ’80s, in particular my all-time favorite comedy, Top Secret! There’s a lot of that Cold War classic in Mayday in terms of the setting and the style of humor, which is often over-the-top slapstick. The more it leans into that, and the comic chemistry between Branagh and Ryan Reynolds, the better it works.
Mayday is sort of a synthesis of Top Secret! with another iconic film of that era, Top Gun, and the mix of espionage satire with military adoration jibes surpisingly well. Set in 1987, the film largely centers on Reynolds’ brash fighter pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly, who is recruited into an off-the-books mission in the newly-revealed SR-71 Blackbird across enemy lines. But when the plane is shot down and Kelly crashes down in Soviet Russia, it’s Ustinov who comes to his rescue. Kelly, who wakes up tied to a bed like he just landed in Misery, doesn’t understand his luck. He’s in the care of the most America-obsessed Russkie on the planet, someone who worships at the altar of Top Gun which he watches on a bootleg VHS tape.
I can’t remember the last time Branagh has been this funny and relaxed. Ustinov, a Russian carpenter with a kind soul, is the perfect contrast to Reynolds’ Kelly, who kinda comes across as the ugly, smug American ideal that we presented as for far too long. To Reynolds’ credit, he ultimately finds a nice balance with the tongue-in-cheek, self-referential humor he brings as Deadpool, but it takes a while to get there. Branagh and Reynolds capture the oil and water dynamic of classic buddy comedies, reminding at times of Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd in Spies Like Us.
Ultimately, Mayday is about Kelly and Ustinov trying to get out of enemy territory and to the safety of the U.S. embassy. They’re hotly pursued by the KGB and enforcer Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), who want to hold Kelly hostage and likely imprison or execute Ustinov for being a traitor. The question becomes whether the U.S. will grant Ustinov, a former high-ranking KGB official, the asylum he desperately wants, not just for himself but for his daughter, played by Maria Bakalova in a small, underwritten role.
There’s considerably more action than expected, with all of it moving briskly and shot with a crispness by DP Barry Peterson. Goldstein and Daley have improved greatly as filmmakers, and it’s been as their writing has grown more confident. Their remake of Vacation couldn’t match the charm of the original, but it wasn’t terrible. They followed that with one the hilarious ensemble, Game Night, and their biggest film, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, easily the best attempt to capitalize on that epic pop culture franchise.
I would argue that Mayday could have been even better. There are some clear missed opportunities for bigger laughs; a train sequence in which each car is piled with more and more deadly Russian soldiers, just barely misses the mark. The film is never convincing in evoking any real sense of danger, or the paranoia that fueled the Cold War era and made laughing about it so therapeutic.
It’s a shame that Mayday is only arriving on Apple TV rather than in theaters, like the films it emulates were able to years ago. While hardly perfect, I suspect that it will be received as they were, and as many of Goldstein and Daley’s films are, as a cult favorite worth revisiting over and over.
Mayday hits Apple TV on September 4th.
