Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley — Screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
The latest straight-to-streaming Apple TV+ film, Mayday, is the third directorial feature for creative duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, best known for their hit comedy Game Night. Although their directorial debut, Vacation (a 2015 sequel to the National Lampoon’s Vacation film series), was critically panned (It’s not great, but I think it has its moments), they’ve managed to garner a solid reputation over the years. They bounced back, in a great way, with the aforementioned original comedy Game Night, before they tried their hands with another major franchise, namely Dungeons & Dragons in 2023. Though that fantasy comedy, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, was classified as a box office disappointment, it was a really fun film that deserved a much better fate than it got. So, with such a reputation, and with those films under their belt, I was excited to see what their first straight-to-streaming film would look like. Thankfully, it’s a really effective action-comedy, despite some blemishes.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Mayday is an action comedy set in 1987, roughly forty years into the Cold War, and it follows a gifted but cocky and openly anti-Communist US Navy pilot with the call sign “Assassin,” named Troy Kelly (played by Ryan Reynolds). During a top-secret mission over the Soviet Union, his aircraft is fired upon and shot down. Though he ejects from the aircraft and survives a violent landing, the American pilot passes out quickly after reaching the ground. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a cottage owned by an ex-KGB agent named Nikolai Ustinov (played by Kenneth Branagh). However, luckily, Ustinov just so happens to have become a major fan of the United States of America and, in particular, the movie Top Gun, so he is eager to help the US Navy pilot survive being behind enemy lines. Together, they go on a perilous journey to get Kelly safely out of Soviet Russia and, potentially, secure asylum for Ustinov in the United States.
Mayday is a really fun watch. It is a really well-paced flick that flows really well and never feels overlong. It is, essentially, equal parts a Top Gun rip-off, a buddy road movie, and a behind-the-enemy-lines action comedy. It notably lacks the verisimilitude of Top Gun: Maverick, which was designed in such a way that everything looked and felt real (with the actors even being in the fighter planes as they were flown and filmed). It’s a tough comparison for Mayday in that regard, because the Top Gun-esque scenes clearly utilize obvious visual effects. It’s one of the biggest marks against the film, but the film is, on the whole, so good that you end up not really caring about that blemish. The action is refreshingly clear and most often presented in long and relatively wide shots, and there is a strong sense of style and flair. I made note of its well-balanced use of split-diopter shots, its very satisfying and seamless match-cut montage of wide shots that lock a vehicle in the foreground while the background highlights the changing environment, and the use of bird’s-eye-view extreme wide shots of a car, a train, or a significant location. I could go on. It is a slickly made film with fun and engaging action that, over the course of the film, takes place in or on both a plane, a train, and an automobile.
Performance-wise, Ryan Reynolds gets to be his usual quippy self, which he has basically built a brand around. But it feels more measured than his laugh-a-minute comedies. It also turns out that Reynolds is really good when paired with an up-for-anything Kenneth Branagh. Like he’s done in everything from Tenet to his Hercule Poirot films, Branagh gets to ‘put on’ a relatively thick accent, but it never devolves into feeling cartoonish. Branagh gets the best action scenes and the funniest scenes in the film, and he plays it perfectly. He is genuinely great as he switches tone from one line to the next to land great comedic payoffs off of cleverly written setup, where he is tasked with delivering lines seriously and with a well-measured intensity. Although both David Morse and Maria Bakalova appear in supporting roles with very serious subplots, their parts are rather thinly written, and I was especially surprised that Bakalova didn’t end up tagging along with the duo once she shows up, as that might’ve been fun to watch.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Mayday is one of the best straight-to-streaming action comedies, full stop. It features acting stars doing good work, plenty of cleverly written lines, and engrossing action presented with a refreshing level of clarity. Admittedly, the central character arc is fairly predictable (learning that things aren’t black and white), and it relies more on visual effects than the films it’s inspired by, but it is a thoroughly entertaining watch nonetheless. Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves are still Goldstein and Daley’s best work from their director’s chairs, but Mayday is a very good action-comedy that fits in well with the rest of their filmography.
7.7 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
