Mayday knows exactly what it is: a high-concept buddy comedy where a smartass American fighter pilot and a Russophile retired KGB man are stuck together in a log cabin watching Top Gun on bootleg VHS. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein — the team behind Game Night — are working comfortably in their lane, and the lane is well-paved. Ryan Reynolds plays Troy Kelly, callsign 'Assassin,' a 1987 Navy hotshot whose spy plane goes down over Soviet territory. He wakes up in Kenneth Branagh's dacha, and Branagh — playing Nikolai Ustinov with cheerful, barely-contained mania — suggests they just wait out the cold war together. It's a premise that could curdle fast: think Misery, or the darkly comic trap of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, where Tony Last is made to read Dickens forever to a lunatic in the jungle. That the film pivots instead into a breakout-and-buddy-road-picture is both its safest and its smartest choice. Branagh is the genuine surprise here. He busts out martial arts moves with apparent commitment, matches Reynolds' rapid-fire delivery without getting swallowed by it, and plays Nikolai's obsessive Americophilia as something genuinely touching rather than merely comic. Reynolds does Reynolds — the raised-eyebrow wisecracks, the action-hero competence worn lightly — but he knows when to let Branagh's stranger choices breathe. The set pieces escalate on schedule: speeding cars, a rattling train (a genre staple as old as Buster Keaton), a climactic aircraft interior that becomes a shooting gallery. The Moscow automotive finale reportedly channels late Roger Moore Bond — which is accurate, and not quite an insult. Marcin Dorocinski's Volkov is the regulation stone-faced pursuer, given little to do beyond looking menacing, which he does adequately. The film's one significant miss is the handling of its queer thread. There's an unexpected element at the end that the review flags but doesn't fully describe — but Daley and Goldstein had an obvious angle sitting right in front of them: the long-running gay readings of Top Gun, the film's central fetish object, which Quentin Tarantino famously decoded in Sleep with Me (1994) and which the 2022 sequel Maverick quietly acknowledged. Threading that into a cold war story about two men trapped together watching it would have elevated Mayday from cheerful genre exercise to something with genuine subversive wit. They left it on the table. What they didn't leave on the table: the physical comedy, the stunt work, and an unexpected screen rapport between two actors who have no obvious reason to work together this well. Mayday isn't trying to be Top Gun or even its knowing parody — it's aiming for the breezy mid-budget action-comedy that studios stopped making around 2010, and in that specific ambition, it mostly succeeds.
