Mayday

Reviewed by Fraser · 10 min read · Rated November 2026

Mayday is an Apple Original Film, and it’s streaming only, with no cinema run at all. It landed on Apple TV on Friday, September 4, and it runs just under two hours. The setup is a good one. It’s 1987, the tail end of the Cold War, and a hotshot US Navy pilot on a top secret reconnaissance mission gets shot down over Soviet Russia. His only chance of survival comes in the form of an alliance with an eccentric ex-KGB agent, played by Kenneth Branagh. Now, the two directors here, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, are the pair behind Game Night and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and if you haven’t seen Game Night, do yourself a favour. It’s one of the sharpest studio comedies of the last decade, and Honor Among Thieves was a far better film than anyone expected it to be. So going in, this had real pedigree behind the camera. And I’ll be honest with you right up front: I had fun with Mayday, but this is also a movie that kept getting in its own way, and we’re going to talk about exactly how.

The Dream Team on Paper

Let’s start with the cast, because that’s what pulled me in. Kenneth Branagh has always been an actor and a director I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. His Poirot in the Agatha Christie mysteries, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting in Venice, directing the first Thor movie, which I still think holds up brilliantly, and a whole scattering of great work across the last 20 years or so. And Ryan Reynolds, obviously, is Deadpool. We all know he has the comedy chops for an action comedy. The problem with Reynolds in a comedy is that he pretty much only has one gear: quick sarcasm and punchlines. But Branagh has that beautiful British dry wit about him, so I was keen to see how those two flavours would mix. On paper, this comes across a little like the old school movie Bat 21, and obviously Behind Enemy Lines as well, that stranded pilot, escape and evade setup. Straight off the bat, this was a movie I already thought I could like.

And for about 60 seconds, it looked like it was going to do something I love: jump you straight to the point where the movie should begin. No 15 minutes of the hero being a lovely guy with a family before it all turns to custard. It opens right at the crash. Then the movie throws us back to Reynolds in the plane as Lieutenant Troy Kelly, codename Assassin, and rewinds to how he got there. And because it’s set in 1987, I was hoping for some really good ’80s music pumped all the way through, and the film does deliver some of that, including a very well placed bit of Bruce Springsteen with Dancing in the Dark later on. After that opening crash, the whole thing settles into a very fun Top Gun feeling. We get Kelly doing test flights and mock combat, helping a fellow pilot with a faulty plane, then visiting his dad in hospital, played by David Morse, always a welcome face, a wonderful character actor you’ll know from The Green Mile among plenty of others. And the Top Gun vibes just kept coming. The boys walk into a bar in their dress whites, and I was half expecting Kelly to serenade a good-looking girl at the bar and turn the whole thing into a complete Top Gun knockoff.

Instead, before Kelly can even enjoy his night out, he gets snapped away at the entrance and recruited for a secret reconnaissance flight over Russia. And here’s a fun detail: he’s not flying the U-2 spy plane. He’s flying the Blackbird, the very impressive one, with a pilot up front and Kelly in the back seat. Visibility is poor at altitude, so they’re told to drop low, grab the photos, and climb back out, and when they do, there’s a Russian bogey right behind them. The plane gets shot up, the pilot gets hit, and Kelly is left wrestling a dying aircraft. He ejects, and in a great little beat, uses his own plane as a ginormous bullet to take out the Russian fighter on the way down. But what he doesn’t realise is that the debris above him is shredding his parachute apart, and suddenly he’s falling with nothing holding him up. And that’s where the movie loops back to its opening: the crashed plane, and a bearded hunter with a large rifle walking towards Kelly as he passes out.

A Carpenter Who Is Not Just a Carpenter

That hunter is Branagh’s character, Nikolai Ustinov, Nick, a former KGB agent who now lives as a carpenter in the middle of nowhere, and who patches up Kelly’s leg and brings him back to his cabin. And this is where the film’s best running joke kicks in. Nick is completely obsessed with America. The cabin is covered in American memorabilia, the moon landing, Mount Rushmore, and a huge Top Gun poster on the wall, which is a lovely payoff to everything the film had been winking at for 20 minutes. Nick dreams of moving to America and driving coast to coast. Troy, meanwhile, finds out he is a very long way from anywhere friendly. The nearest border is Finland, 2,000 kilometres away, and there’s a warmongering KGB officer named Volkov, played by Marcin Dorociński, already hunting for the pilot who came down on Soviet soil.

Troy being Troy, he promises Nick he’ll stay put, then bolts the second his restraints come off. And this is how we discover Nick is not just some carpenter. There’s a scuffle at the cabin where Troy simply does not stand a chance; you can see serious training in the way this older man throws him around. Troy still gets away, steals Nick’s car, and finds a bar in the middle of nowhere, where he unwisely asks for help, gets found out as an American, and gets set upon by the patrons, until Nick arrives and takes on the entire room. Pool cues, billiard balls, even the diamond rack you set the balls up with. It reminded me a lot of Taken, that thrill of watching an older character, your Liam Neeson type, absolutely wipe the floor with a room full of younger men. Branagh, with the big beard and the weary eyes, sells every second of it. From there the deal is struck. Nick will usher Troy across the country to safety, and in exchange, Troy promises to get Nick asylum in America, along with his estranged daughter Anna, played by Maria Bakalova, who you’ll remember from her Oscar-nominated turn in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

What follows is a proper buddy movie, two men who start out not liking each other and slowly come around, while Volkov and the Russians close in behind them. There’s a great tension beat on a train, where Troy steps away to redress his bandage and comes back to find the entire carriage has filled with Russian soldiers, with Nick still fast asleep in his seat. And the film knows exactly what lineage it belongs to. Planes, trains and automobiles: they get through all of them, and funnily enough, Planes, Trains and Automobiles the movie came out in 1987, the very year this is set. The way the two leads bounce off each other has real echoes of that dynamic. But this is also where my problems started creeping in. For a story that is essentially two guys travelling across Russia to reach a phone, there is a huge amount of CGI in places that simply don’t need it. You’ll spot it in the very first shots of the film, with the bird and the water, and it keeps flickering through, glimpses that make the whole thing feel cheaper than it should. And what is with all the creepy people who stare in this movie? They’ve really pushed a few characters whose whole job is to gaze at Troy and unsettle him, and it lands as odd more than menacing.

There’s a wonderful farce sequence when the boys finally reach a house with a phone, only for the man of the house to arrive home with a young woman who is very obviously not his wife. Nick and Troy hide in the wine cellar, the man’s actual family turns up, the young woman gets shoved into the same cellar, and when the wife asks for a wine, the husband opens the cellar door to find all three of them standing there, and Troy just calmly hands him a bottle. The look on the man’s face is worth the price of admission. But the phone call itself brings bad news. Because Troy was flying a black op, America can’t acknowledge he exists, let alone come and get him. His only options are the embassy in Moscow or the border. So they steal a car and head for the capital, and we get one of those classic mid-movie driving montages through iconic Russian scenery, and once again, it’s blatantly CGI. You can tell by the contrast alone. Honestly, big stretches of this movie feel like it was made under COVID restrictions, all green screens and digital backdrops, and for a film at this level, from this studio, that kept pulling me out of it. Around the one-hour mark, the title clicks into place too. Mayday is the call for help, sure, but they arrive in Moscow just as the city is gearing up for an enormous May Day festival, which floods the streets with soldiers at the worst possible time.

Where the Seams Show

The third act takes a real dramatic shift, and I won’t go too deep into the details because it’s much better discovered on screen. What I will say is that there are some quietly sweet scenes between Nick and Anna, including the truth about why he left the KGB, and there’s a turn in the Nick and Troy relationship that gives Branagh some of his best material in the film. It all builds to a huge chase through the May Day festival, a very over-the-top sequence with some very unusual getaway vehicles, and for a stretch there we seem to have wandered into a Fast and the Furious movie with how extravagant it gets. And it’s in these action-heavy sections that my other big complaint bites hardest. In several of the fight scenes there are cuts where you can clearly see it’s not the actors, it’s the stuntmen. We are in 2026. Filmmaking has reached a level where spotting the seam between stuntman and actor should be nearly impossible, and a movie should never break that illusion. Between the visible doubles and the patchy CGI, the camera work and editing here are just not up to the standard of the two men in front of the lens. And that’s the real pity, because the chemistry between Branagh and Reynolds is terrific, and the film keeps cheaping out around them.

So where does that leave us? Mayday is a fun movie with a genuine problem. The premise works, the ’80s flavour works, the buddy dynamic works, and Branagh in particular is worth the watch all on his own. His warmth, his dry wit and his surprising physicality carry whole stretches of this film. Reynolds does exactly what Reynolds does, and against Branagh it lands better than it has in some of his recent outings. But the craft around them keeps betraying the illusion: the CGI backdrops, the visible stunt doubles, the editing that lets you see the joins. There was a really good movie available here, and what we got is a fun one wrapped in a cheap-looking one.

But look, that’s just how Mayday landed for me. Entertainment is subjective, and what pulled me out of this one might not even register for you. If you can look past the seams, there’s a big-hearted throwback adventure in here that might just become your comfort watch of the year, and honestly, I hope it does. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s completely okay.