Daley and Goldstein, the duo best known for Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, can’t recapture the zany antics of their own best work or even goofy movies like Spies Like Us, but the latter seems like what’s what they were aiming for. Instead of two Americans bumbling past the Iron Curtain, one hotshot American pilot and a Russian who knows how to fight (and really wants to taste McDonald’s) will do. Despite its low threshold for jokes, Mayday is hamfistedly trying to send the message that it’s important to learn more about our supposed enemies and find that they’re not all that bad. At the start of the movie, Kelly is teased by his crew for being “Captain America” when he trash-talks Communism for not celebrating individual successes. “You’re just another comrade,” he scoffs in reply. Later, Kelly learns that Russians can be just like us!
A silly comedy about infiltrating the Russians isn’t the best place to look for ideological nuance, but this clunky theme is just one of the ideas in Mayday that feels forced, as do its many ’80s references, in case you forgot just when the Cold War was starting to sputter. Aside from so many references to Top Gun that you may wish you were watching Top Gun instead, big recognizable needledrops like Van Halen’s “Jump” set the mood. Daley and Goldstein attempt to shake things up with the visual style of the film, but the result is both interesting yet strangely off-putting. Teaming up with their Dungeons & Dragons cinematographer Barry Peterson and various VFX teams including WETA, their action sequences contain a dizzying sense of weightlessness, moving through various rooms and spaces with frictionless smoothness. Some of these shots, like following Nikolai through a hole, into a downstairs apartment, and out a door before an explosion tears through the space is impressive. Others, like CGI steadicam sequences, look uncannily fake and unappealing to watch as they tie one shot to the next.
The odd couple of Reynolds and Branagh is amusing at the start, but once it settles into its rhythm, it wears out its novelty. Reynolds does his “bored of this bit” schtick, supposed to be the straight man, and it’s not particularly funny to watch someone that checked-out of a comedy pairing. Branaugh—doing his best Moscow On The Hudson impression of a Russian who loves America so much that he’s willing to go into exile to help his new friend—remains committed to the gag, getting in on the action more so than the American pilot his character is protecting. There’s also a subplot about Kelly’s ailing dad (David Morse) that gets at an interesting idea, which is that to love one’s country is to stand up to it, but it’s so shoehorned in it loses its poignancy.
Mayday is fully lackluster, with even its action scenes failing to rescue its agents from boredom. It may be paying tribute to “bumbling Americans abroad” comedies, but it similarly never finds its footing. The only thing it’s sure about is who’s bankrolling this project; Mayday ends by extolling the virtue of a good McDonald’s meal, with a drone-like shot floating up above the D.C. skyline, capitalism safe and ensconced in the nation’s capital.
Directors: John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
Writers: John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Kenneth Branagh, David Morse, Maria Bakalova, Louis Cancelmi
Release Date: September 4, 2026 (Apple TV)
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