My quick rating – 6.7/10. Lieutenant Troy Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) is taking part in a top-secret surveillance mission over Soviet airspace when things go wrong, leaving him stranded in the Russian wilderness. Now you know where the Mayday comes from. He is eventually rescued by Nick (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian native with a rather unexpected fondness for America, and the two discover that perhaps the Cold War doesn’t have to involve quite so much cold after all.
The movie opens with Kelly lying in the snow, desperately trying to pry his helmet off and looking very much like this is not how he expected his day to go. Before he can have a confrontation with another man who has discovered the wreckage, he passes out. Then it’s time to Jump over to some Van Halen as a couple of jets come screaming across the Pacific Ocean in 1987.
That’s right, we’re going back to the Cold War. About 40 years into it, in case the fighter jets, Soviet airspace and aggressive amount of ’80s music hadn’t tipped you off.
Eventually, we find out exactly why Kelly ends up face-down in the snow, and thankfully, we don’t have to wait two hours for the answer. You’ll know by around the 20-minute mark. The sequence explaining how he gets there is actually pretty damn good, although it does involve an insanely silly scene designed to establish Kelly’s personality. It’s not exactly buzzing the tower, but think along those lines, only considerably more ridiculous. Apparently, Cold War fighter pilots had a slightly different definition of “responsible aviation.”
Nick, the Russian who finds Kelly, was briefly seen earlier and turns out to be a huge fan of the USA. Naturally, he also happens to own a bootleg VHS copy of Top Gun. Because if you’re going to make an ’80s movie about an American fighter pilot crashing into Soviet territory, there was absolutely no way Top Gun wasn’t going to show up somewhere. LOL.
From there, Mayday settles into a very entertaining ’80s buddy-cop formula, except instead of two cops, we’ve got an American fighter pilot and a Russian ex-KGB badass trying not to kill each other long enough to become friends.
Reynolds is, well, Ryan Reynolds. He’s playing the wisecracking smartass you’ve seen him play approximately 47 times before, and as usual, it works. The real surprise is Branagh. He is completely out of character as a ridiculously capable, ass-kicking former KGB officer. And he’s fantastic. He’s funny, intimidating, charming, and somehow makes the whole ridiculous premise work. It’s another reminder that Kenneth Branagh can apparently do just about anything with acting involved.
There are plenty of ’80s songs for the nostalgia crowd, some nice action sequences, and several genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. It’s not trying to reinvent the Cold War movie, but it doesn’t need to.
Mayday is simply a fun movie. It’s silly, occasionally very silly, but it knows exactly what kind of trip it wants to take us on. Throw in Reynolds, Branagh, fighter jets, Soviet Russia, bootleg Top Gun and a healthy dose of 80s hits, and you’ve got a pretty entertaining couple of hours.
