Joel on Film

The best way to describe Mayday is that the film takes its political and historical backdrop seriously but very much has quite a bit of fun with its central pairing of an active duty Navy pilot and a Russian former agent of the KGB. They’re played, respectively, by Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, and before you ask the question, yes, that means a lot of the obvious from one of these actors. They say that, if it isn’t broken, one shouldn’t fix it, and while that’s not an entirely accurate thing to say about the actor in question, at least this movie knows how to put his schtick to good use.

You know by now that these things are being said about Reynolds, who has, more or less (and definitely more “more” than “less”), played the same character across his past decade or so of work, and that character is one of abrasive self-awareness and occasionally suffocating irony. This time, though, there is a deep irony to his character of Troy Kelly, who always wanted to be a fighter pilot and now receives the chance to do—from his perspective as a burrowed-in patriot—some good for his country. It involves, as it must, a highly classified mission in which he, along with a lead pilot, will man the then-brand-new stealth fighter into enemy territory to test out a snazzy new camera.

That, by the way, is the extent of the mission, which goes awry almost immediately upon entering Russian airspace: Shot down, forced to eject (which he does in a clever move, as part of a spectacular set piece, that takes out an enemy craft) and nearly captured by operatives, Troy is saved from certain death itself by the other character in this two-hander. He’s Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh, injecting some warmth and sadness behind a scraggly beard), the former KGB interrogator and torture specialist, who is now persona non grata to his old workplace and, because of the circumstances, obsessed with the idea of America. “Nick,” as he much prefers to be called, is fascinated in particular by a specific movie that just recently presented a rosy view of American patriotism.

We see a poster of it, in fact, in a particularly solid gag once Troy awakens from his black-out period, with Tom Cruise’s smolder leering at him from the poster of that movie—which, along with its years-later sequel, could easily be considered the direct inspiration for this one (they even share a studio and an executive producer in common). Of course, that movie is no such paragon of any realistic sort of outlook on American military life or service or, really, anything else. It’s really just an action-packed roller coaster wearing a uniform, and this movie, by so openly poking fun at its idealism, proves it knows exactly what its doing in moments like these.

The plot has Troy promising asylum in the States for Nick, assuring him that Troy’s status as found after being MIA or presumed dead will shelter whatever claims Nick could have for himself. First, they need to find Nick’s daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova), who resents her father for the work he did and his apparent inattentiveness to her needs. These scenes are where the comic aspirations of writers/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein fall away to expose something more sincere, as Anna has kept a big secret about herself and Nick has kept one, too, with both needing to hash things out (the moment plays out inaudibly—a moment private from both Troy and us).

What follows is a road-trip movie with a particularly sharp set of stakes, as Troy and Nick are on the run, not only to reach the American embassy in Moscow, but from a current top KGB man (played by Marcin Dorocinski) who is absolutely tireless in his pursuit. On this trip, the two men are able to hash out the differences between them—set by the propagandistic arms of both their nations, each of them having been told how evil and genocidal the other one is. They both have a point, of course—that the American propaganda of red-white-and-blue patriotism looks a lot like the Soviet counterpart if one simply squints his eyes, while Khruschev’s own violent promises led to a lot of what the Soviet Union looks like in the present year of the movie (1987).

Reynolds and Branagh play off each other with the kind of comic bravado that was prevalent in the buddy-comedies of the very era in which their characters reside. Reynolds especially is good at incorporating bits of his usual persona into a more sincere character (asked if he’s heard of Big Bird, “but not the one from ‘Sesame Street’,” he simply quips, “Then no”). The film is also about its set pieces, from that daring ejection escape to a chase set on a speeding train to the unusually inventive climax, where the pair finds perhaps the only possible mode of getaway transportation upon which the villains would not dare fire.

This is probably familiar and occasionally silly stuff, with an outlook that naturally favors the American side of its central argument (although it’s a little funny to cast a Canadian actor as the all-American boy scout and an English actor as the Soviet national to get this across). Mayday on the whole, though, also features a big of character growth to go alongside it, in a film that works as an action movie flecked with laughs, a comedy interrupted by action, and a buddy comedy of historical proportions.

Rating: *** (out of ****)