By Dan Skip Allen

Anybody who knows me knows I like a movie set in the 70s/80s. They are a couple of decades that I grew up in. I just have an affinity for these kinds of movies. The history, music, cars, hair, and clothes are all right up my alley. The latest movie that takes place in the 80s and has all of the things I love about the decade is a cold war action/comedy “Mayday” starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. It reminded me of “Spies Like Us” starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd and “Red Heat” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The pinnacle of the Cold War era where comedies about political subjects were very prominent. This is another one of those types of movies.

Toby “Assassin” Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) is a hot shot Navy pilot ala Maverick (Tom Cruise) in “Top Gun.” He is the best there is at what he does, which is flying jet planes. He’s so good that he even gets himself in trouble sometimes. He ends up catching the eye of the commanding officer of the base he operates out of, and he decides to give him a special mission. A covert black ops mission using at the time the SR71 Blackbird. Him and a co-pilot are tasked with flying over Russian Airspace to get pictures of their nuclear armaments. They think they’re being pretty sneaky flying over Russia with a covert aircraft, but it doesn’t work. They are seen by the Soviet military and shot down. His co-pilot Colonel Sanders (Louis Cancelmi) is dead, while Reynolds’ character is injured pretty badly. He’s rescheduled by an unknown, blurry man because he passes out from blood loss. It turns out the man who saved his life and patched him up to some extent was ex-KGB Agent Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), not an enemy.

Ryan Reynolds has proven to be a funny guy but also very sympathetic in some of his films. He puts himself in the role of the average guy a lot. Movies like “Free Guy”, “If” and “The Adam Project” ”have shown me he can be relatable. Not so much the “Deadpool Trilogy” and not as much in “Mayday” either. He can be smug and pompous in a lot of his films. He comes across that way here as well. It doesn’t help that he’s playing a hot shot, Navy pilot, either. I wanted to care about this man and his plight, but I found myself being more annoyed by his antics and shtick than actually caring about his situation that he’s in. I liked the Branagh character better because he has a more interesting story than the Reynolds character. 

Branagh has this holier than thou persona in a lot of his movies. He plays Hercule Poirot in a trilogy of films, and that didn’t help him trying to be less better than everyone else in his movies. Here, he plays a man who is supposed to be the best at what he does but would rather enjoy American pop culture and have his daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova) back in his life. They have been estranged for a while. He I thrust into this situation, and it helps him be more personable. His back and forth with Reynolds was fine, but I felt he understood the assignment regarding his role more than Reynolds did. I genuinely cared about him and his story more than Reynolds’ character. That’s a shame because I wanted to care about both of them equally as much as each other.

As a movie such as this will do, there are a number of action scenes that revolve around comedic situations.  One of them is a train sequence where the two leads end up on a train after they escape another tense situation.  The train scene was funny because it’s a scene with these guys who are trying to escape the Russians, but they’re all over the train. This is a crazy scenario to get through. There are dozens of Russian soldiers with guns trying to kill both of these guys. It’s gut-wrenching to watch. The two directors play the scene off as a bit funny, though. Even though it’s a life or death survival moment. Another crazy scenario is one that is on a commuter plane. These scenes help get me through watching the film.

The directors John Farancis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein tried to have a mix of different things in this film. Comedy and action were the two main things they wanted to give viewers. The action is pretty good, but the comedy isn’t as good. I didn’t find myself laughing at many scenes or circumstances that these two men found themselves in. The back and forth banter between Reynolds and Branagh was okay but not great. I didn’t feel this film went hard enough in either direction, comedy, or action for my liking. If it were more of a comedy, maybe I would have laughed more, but if it were more of an action movie, maybe I would have liked it more. Who knows? I can only say it wasn’t enough of either for me to fully enjoy it and be totally invested in these characters and the story.

The supporting cast of this movie wasn’t great either. Marcin Dorocinski played a Russian who was chasing the two main characters all over Russia. He was a cookie-cutter bad guy that I’ve seen more than a dozen times by now. Very straightforward, no emotion except for anger. Maria Bakalova played Branagh’s character’s daughter, but she wasn’t in the film enough for me to care about her and her father’s story enough. I wanted to, though. David Morse played Reynolds’ character’s father, but his story felt like an add-on as part of the beginning and end of the movie. I wasn’t totally sure why this was added to the film. Maybe to give the Reynolds character a sympathetic angle. I don’t know why this was added to the film.

One of the positives I can say about this movie was that there was a fantastic soundtrack. Songs such as Van Halen’s & David Lee Roth’s “Jump” , Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and “I’m on Fire” were among the songs that played in the film. I think these songs added to the 80s vibe the movie was going for. I like it when a soundtrack can accentuate a film like this one did. To add to that, there was also a terrific score by Colin Stetson. The music overall was pretty good in this film. I just wish the movie was better and could have matched the music.

“”Mayday” was a movie I had relatively high hopes for. It had a combination of two actors I hadn’t seen together before, and I wanted to see how they melded together. The comedy and drama actors didn’t seem like they worked very well together to me. I like Branagh more than Reynolds in this particular film. The action scenes were pretty cool, and I loved hearing the music from my youth. The period aspect of the story was one I’d hoped played better as a story element, but it was just a thing in the background of this crazy story. I think this concept in better hands may have resulted in a better overall film, but in the hands of Francis Daley and Goldstein, it was just a meh film.

Mayday is streaming on Apple TV on September 4th

🌟 🌟 stars