I really didn’t know what to expect from Apple’s new film Mayday, which skipped a theatrical release despite the star presence of Ryan Reynolds and was slotted into early September. The late August and early September period around Labor Day used to be considered the doldrums of theatrical releases. Every once in a while, a film would challenge that idea, obviously, but this isn’t necessarily when people release their best films. So, with Apple dropping Mayday here, I was definitely a little worried. However, I was encouraged by the directorial team of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who previously did wonders with Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which they are still hoping to make a sequel to. Mayday is another gold star for them, as it’s surprisingly entertaining for what it is.
It starts off rather simply, introducing us to Ryan Reynolds as Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly, a Navy fighter pilot during the Cold War whose best representation of what he thinks he is would probably be the hit new movie Top Gun. We quickly see that Troy is a gifted pilot when his first sequence has him rescuing one of his friends with what seems like a highly dangerous maneuver, establishing Assassin as one tough pilot. But will he be tough enough when he’s sent on a black-ops mission into the Soviet Union to destroy a target off the books, only for his plane to be shot down, his copilot and friend to die, and Troy to be left fending for himself in the Russian wilderness?
Luckily for him, he doesn’t have to survive by himself for much longer. Luckily for us, too, because Ryan Reynolds is basically just doing Ryan Reynolds. There’s not much acting here. He has figured out that people like this Deadpool vibe, and he delivers his snarky one-liners as much as he possibly can. Reynolds used to give more interesting performances in films like Buried and The Amityville Horror, but gone are those days. These are the days of Ryan Reynolds, box-office star.
Kenneth Branagh steps in as Nikolai Ustinov, a former KGB intelligence officer who turns out to be a massive fan of America and democracy in general. He has been looking for an opportunity to migrate to the United States, which is understandably difficult for a former KGB officer. When an American war hero drops near his cabin in the woods, Nikolai takes him in, tries to fix up his wounds as best he can, and gets ready to help transport him 2,000 kilometers to the nearest border.
Nikolai really is the injection this film needed. Not only is Kenneth Branagh apparently in his Liam Neeson phase, where he can bash heads with the best of them, but Nikolai is also incredibly knowledgeable. He knows how to help conceal Troy’s crashed plane, and his ability to speak Russian is invaluable in a country that’s highly suspicious of anyone speaking English with an American accent. Thus, our buddy comedy begins, which is appropriate considering this movie takes place in the 1980s, when buddy comedies were on the rise. Nikolai is a huge fan of Top Gun, so of course those references are going to come. While these two don’t initially get along as well as Nikolai might have hoped, the film takes an interesting journey toward making them the best kind of friends anyone could hope for in this situation. I was really rooting for them, and that’s a good thing.
The standout here is Kenneth Branagh. Reynolds is doing what he always does, while Branagh makes the film special and delivers something that feels like we haven’t seen from him before. There are a couple of additional performers who seem rather unnecessary. The film doesn’t have enough time for David Morse, who plays Troy’s dying father, Harold. He’s not given nearly enough to do, considering he’s David Morse. Maria Bakalova, who earned an Oscar nomination for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, is also here for about five minutes as Nikolai’s daughter, Anna, who is part of an underground resistance. It seems like she could become a third wheel or possible love interest for Troy, but the film basically abandons her, making me wonder why she was introduced at all. Her character could have remained a concept we never met, but since the film bothered to bring her into the story, it probably could have used her more. I also enjoyed seeing Wendy Crewson here because she was in The Santa Clause, which I love and watch every year, but her performance is similarly brief.
The audio description from Pixelogic needed a quality check because narrator Leslie Kay, who has successfully handled other audio-description tracks, really disappointed me here. I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the importance of human audio description versus synthetic voices, and one supposed advantage of having a human involved is that a person can look at a script and say, “This doesn’t make any sense. That word isn’t correct.” Yet Kay says “runaway” instead of “runway,” which means something completely different and turns the sentence into nonsense within the context of the scene. I rewound it multiple times and listened again. There is clearly an extra A sound in there. I’m not crazy.
If I’m going to stand up here and argue that human performers are smarter than synthetic code, then I need them to be. I need them to get their shit together, and I need audio-description companies like Pixelogic to pay attention to what they’re producing and properly quality-check it. Pixelogic may feel like it has a Teflon connection to Apple because it seemingly describes everything Apple has ever made and ever will make, but that doesn’t excuse the company from making sure its product remains as high-quality as possible.
I didn’t have a problem with Kay’s narration throughout the rest of the film. Her voice and performance didn’t bother me. But when we reached the scene in question, which I can’t describe without spoilers, I immediately noticed the mistake. It reminded me of all the times I’ve heard a text-to-speech voice mispronounce a word because it couldn’t recognize a typo or misspelling and simply read what was on the page. Here, a living human being did it. Not a program. Not code. An actual person thought this was a complete sentence and read it that way without questioning it. So I’m questioning it.
Mayday is a lot of fun for a war-adjacent buddy comedy, and that’s due in large part to Daley and Goldstein being incredibly competent directors and Kenneth Branagh being wildly entertaining. If you have Apple TV and get the chance to see Mayday, you absolutely should. It’s a lot better than I ever thought it would be.
Fresh: 7.5/10
