Apple TV is not immune from having so-so "movie show content" despite some prestigious "TV show content" and thus we have Mayday, the latest from writer-director tag team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein whose last movie was the well-regarded but underseen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (which I haven't gotten around to watching yet). Now they're taking on a Cold War period buddy action dramedy with Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder) and Kenneth Branagh (lots of Shakespeare stuff) as a US pilot and former KGB agent, respectively.
It's 1987 and Reynolds' Naval Lt. Troy "Assassin" Kelly is assigned to an SR-71 spy mission over the Soviet Union after an opening sequence totally copied from Top Gun's opening. When the mission goes sideways resulting in the pilot being killed and Troy forced to eject behind enemy lines, injured when he lands in a forest, he is found and patched up by Nikolai "Call me Nik" Ustinov (Branagh), who has retired from the spy game and harbors a dark secret: He's fascinated by America, especially his favorite movie, a bootleg tape of Top Gun.
2000 kilometers from the closest border with Finland, his original suggestion is that Troy just stay with him until the Cold War ends, but that becomes really impractical when current KGB General Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorociński, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) arrives at Nik's isolated cabin searching for the surviving American pilot from the crash. While Nik manages to hide Troy well enough, he knows this was a temporary win so decides to help get Troy to the US Embassy in Moscow. He hopes that he and his estranged daughter, Anna (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), will be able to defect and gain asylum as a reward for helping Troy escape.
What follows is your standard Odd Couple buddy road trip/action hybrid plot where Nik proves to be quite the badass fighter, taking out multiple opponents in bars, train cars, etc. But since this is a modern movie it gets laden with current Hollyweird ideological baggage that America is a malign entity against its own service people and in some ways no better than the Evil Empire and that "The best way to stand for your country is to stand up against it." Can't have America live up to Top Gun's image, now can we? Also, there's the obligatory LGB subplot to make Nik seem more progressive than the typical Ruskie.
While Reynolds turns in his usual Ryan Reynolds quippy performance, Branagh seems more committed to his bit as a complex man in a oppressive country where he was once the oppressor. Let's not kid ourselves, Mayday isn't remotely deep, but it is sporadically amusing when it's not trying to pontificate about America's ills.
Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on Apple TV.
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