Mayday

Our Verdict on Mayday

Mayday is the kind of movie Hollywood used to make without apology: a buddy action comedy set against a Cold War backdrop, with genuine stakes, real chemistry between its leads, and no interest whatsoever in lecturing the audience about anything. Ryan Reynolds plays Troy 'Assassin' Kelly, a US Navy SR-71 Blackbird pilot who ejects over Soviet territory in 1987 after a mid-air collision with a MiG-29. Stranded, hunted, and badly out of his depth, he stumbles into the life of Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB officer who left the service to become a carpenter in a remote village. What follows is a two-man escape thriller that works because Goldstein and Daley understand something that has become weirdly rare in modern action comedies: you can make a movie about two men from enemy nations learning to trust each other without making one of them apologize for his country.

Kelly is an American patriot. Ustinov is a Soviet defector who saw the KGB for what it was. Neither man is asked to renounce who he is. They are asked to survive together, and the film earns every beat of their partnership through action, humor, and Branagh's beautifully understated performance. Reynolds does his Reynolds thing -- rapid-fire wit, physical comedy, the ability to be charming even when being insufferable -- but Branagh is the anchor. His Ustinov is a man who traded a life of state-sanctioned violence for the quiet dignity of working with his hands, and when Kelly's arrival forces him back into a world he left behind, you believe both his reluctance and his competence. Maria Bakalova, as Ustinov's daughter Anna, provides emotional stakes without becoming a damsel: her relationship with her father is the film's quiet center.

The Cold War setting is a feature, not a bug. In a cinematic landscape where every decade must be examined for its sins, Mayday simply uses 1987 as a playground for a thrilling, funny, ideologically clean two hours. That is not a small thing anymore. It is almost radical. The film's action sequences are practical and legible, a welcome departure from CGI overload. The SR-71 sequences at the top of the film are genuinely tense, and a late-film set piece involving a Soviet train is the kind of practical action filmmaking that makes you remember why real stunts matter. Goldstein and Daley direct action with clarity: you always know where everyone is and what the stakes are.

What makes Mayday refreshing from a VirtueVigil perspective is what it does not do. It does not pause the action so a female character can explain to a male character why he is wrong about everything. It does not make the American pilot a bumbling fool who needs a foreigner to teach him humility. Kelly learns humility the old-fashioned way: by failing, nearly dying, and being forced to rely on someone who is better than him at certain things. That is character growth, not ideological reeducation. Ustinov's rejection of the KGB is personal, not political: he left because he saw what the institution did to people, not because he attended a seminar on decolonization. The film trusts its audience to understand that some men are good and some institutions are corrupt without needing a PowerPoint presentation to explain why. This trust is the defining feature of pre-woke cinema, and its presence here, in a 2026 streaming release, is worth noting explicitly.

Branagh gives the film's best performance. His Ustinov is weary but not broken, cynical but not cruel. He has the bearing of a man who once held power and chose to walk away from it, and Branagh plays that choice as settled business rather than an ongoing crisis. When Kelly asks why he left the KGB, Ustinov gives a one-sentence answer that lands harder than any monologue could. Reynolds, to his credit, knows when to shut up and let Branagh work. Their chemistry is the movie. Without it, Mayday would be a competent but forgettable action comedy. With it, the film has a genuine emotional core that elevates the chase sequences into something resembling a friendship.

For parents, the PG-13 rating is accurate. The action violence is present but not gory: gunfire, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, a few deaths that register without being lingered on. Language is what you would expect from a Ryan Reynolds movie (frequent but not obscene). There is some suggestive banter but no sex or nudity. The Cold War setting means the ideological lines are drawn cleanly: Americans are the good guys, Soviets are the bad guys, and the complexity comes from individuals on both sides who do not fit the categories. This is the kind of movie you can watch with teenagers and have a conversation afterward about what it means to serve a country versus what it means to serve an ideology.

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