Mayday Review: A Great Cold War Buddy Comedy Sabotaged By Its Message

Apple TV’s “Mayday” arrived with a pedigree that was hard not to find exciting. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the team behind “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” reunite for a 1980s Cold War action comedy starring Ryan Reynolds as Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly, a US Navy pilot whose black ops reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory goes wrong and leaves him stranded behind enemy lines. Paramount originally had this project before it landed at Apple TV, and the pairing of these directors with this premise carried promise going in.

That promise shows up early. The film opens stateside in San Diego before Troy heads out on his black ops flight, and the mission itself goes wrong in the air, with his plane coming down after a mid-air collision with a Soviet MiG. An ejection and parachute sequence drops him into the Soviet wilderness, where Nikolai Ustinov, a former KGB agent played by Kenneth Branagh, finds him and patches him up. Nikolai turns out to be obsessed with American culture down to a bootleg VHS of “Top Gun” he watches on repeat and a genuine fondness for McDonald’s, and the film treats his sincerity as its own kind of joke rather than mocking him for it. What Troy does not immediately clock is that Nikolai still has a former interrogator’s fighting skills, which pays off across several hand-to-hand fights later in the film where Branagh does his own share of the physical work.

The opening stretch leans hard into eighties nostalgia, closer to “Top Gun” than anything Daley and Goldstein have made before, and gets real mileage out of Troy’s relationship with his ailing father, Harold, played by David Morse. Those father-son scenes give Reynolds something to work with beyond his usual quips, and they land. Once the pair sets out across the Russian countryside toward the border, the buddy chemistry carries the film through a genuine road trip structure: a train sequence played as a full ride from hell, several vehicle chases, and a run of jokes, including a bit built around Cabbage Patch dolls, that land more often than they miss. Troy does plenty of stupid things along the way for the comedy of it, like trying to contact his people through channels he already knows will get him caught, and the film is smart enough to let those moments nearly blow up in his face rather than let him coast. The action holds up too.

One of the strongest scenes in the entire film is a hiding-in-a-closet sequence where the pair has to stay dead silent while Soviet agents search the room, a real highlight that earns its tension through comic timing rather than noise. Another comes in Moscow, when Troy and Nikolai strike a match to set fire to a Soviet official’s home as a diversion and hole up with Nikolai’s daughter, and the sequence plays as one of the better action beats in the film. For close to the first hour, “Mayday” earns the comparison to Daley and Goldstein’s other work. It is funny, the stakes feel real enough to take seriously, and the central partnership works.

Then the film takes a 180 about an hour in when it introduces Nikolai’s daughter, Anna, played by Maria Bakalova, and everything changes. Anna turns out to be part of a Moscow underground resistance, which is a reasonable enough twist on its own. But the film immediately pivots her into revealing she is a lesbian, hiding it from her own father because homosexuality is illegal in the Soviet Union and the KGB enforces that law. What could have been a single line of dialogue turns into roughly ten minutes of the film stopping dead to lecture the audience about Russia oppressing gay people. Every Apple TV+ show and movie seems built around finding a way to work this same message in somewhere. “Ted Lasso” does it. “Silo” does it. “Pluribus” does it. At a certain point it stops feeling like storytelling and starts feeling like the actual point of the whole platform. Anna’s entire character exists for this one scene. Cut her out of the movie entirely, and nothing about the plot changes. That is not a subplot earning its place in the story. That is a message the writers wanted to deliver, with a character built around it after the fact.

Right after that scene, “Mayday” stops being a movie that’s praiseworthy and starts jumping the shark outright. Troy and Nikolai break into a massive Soviet military parade packed with thousands of people, and the Soviet guards who are supposed to be hunting them do essentially nothing to stop them, incompetent to the point of breaking the film’s own internal logic. The pair then steal a truck hauling a nuclear missile launcher and drive it down the road as their escape vehicle, which is the moment the film stops being an heightened action comedy and starts being outright absurd. Nothing about it plays as remotely plausible anymore, even by the standards the film had already set for itself. That is also the point where the movie lost enough goodwill that it did not get finished. The first hour built something worth watching. The back half threw it away.

There are smaller issues too, forgivable ones in an action comedy but worth noting. A driving scene on the way to Moscow uses an obvious green screen background that visibly shifts during the shot, a low-budget seam that breaks the illusion for a second. Those moments are minor next to the larger problems, but they add up as reminders that this is a streaming production working with real constraints.

“Mayday” runs one hour and fifty minutes, carries a PG-13 rating, and premiered on Apple TV on September 4, 2026, where it has drawn mixed-to-positive reviews from critics. The first hour has a fun premise, a pair of performances that play off each other well, and action that earns genuine laughs. Then it detours into a message that has nothing to do with the story around it, and immediately after, it abandons the plausibility that made the first half work at all. What could have been one of the better action comedies of the year gets derailed by choices that had nothing to do with the Cold War story it set out to tell. This one lands at a four out of ten and did not get a finish, which is a real shame given what the opening hour had going for it.

Does Apple TV’s insistence on working the same message into nearly every original series and film help its slate stand out, or is it starting to cost otherwise strong projects like “Mayday” the audience they were built to earn?

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