Mayday

A good action movie can hit the spot, but a good buddy action movie scratches a different itch. With movies like 48 Hrs.(Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte), Lethal Weapon (Mel Gibson and Danny Glover), and Bad Boys (Will Smith and Martin Lawrence), it’s easy to see how much the right pairing matters. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein hope to add Mayday to that list. The question is, does it belong?

Lieutenant Troy Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) is living the dream as a Navy pilot. It’s the Cold War, Top Gun is still fresh, and he’s a pretty damn good pilot himself. That last part has caught the attention of his superiors, who need him to co-pilot a spy mission deep in Soviet airspace. Of course, things go badly. The plane is shot down, leaving Kelly as the only survivor, but he may have crashed in the right spot.

When Kelly wakes up after being rescued, he finds himself in the company of Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh), who, judging by his decorations, is a big fan of the good old U.S.A. He’s also ex-KGB, which makes things a little more complicated. Nikolai offers to help Kelly escape in exchange for asylum, and Kelly agrees. Getting to safety won’t be easy, though, because the enemy knows he survived. From there, Nikolai leads Kelly across the country, sometimes talking their way out of trouble and sometimes fighting through it. If they’re going to make it out, they’ll have to trust each other and work together.

Written and directed by Daley and Goldstein, Mayday feels like a throwback to the action movies of the ’80s and ’90s, with plenty of action and comedy driving it along. The filmmaking duo brings its usual sense of style, but the movie does run into a few problems. Some of the green-screen work is less than convincing, and the fight choreography occasionally feels stiff. Still, for everything that doesn’t work, there are two things that do.

If you can get past those visual flaws, Mayday settles into a fun, if not especially memorable, watch. Like any buddy action movie, it lives or dies on the chemistry between its stars, and Branagh and Reynolds do just enough to keep it alive. With Reynolds, you know what you’re getting: more often than not, he’s playing Ryan Reynolds. Luckily, Branagh shows up fully committed and often picks up the slack. You might come for Reynolds, but you’ll want to stay for Branagh.

Things go a little haywire in the third act, and the action stretches on longer than I would’ve liked. Even so, Mayday is a perfectly fine, it’s mostly an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. I went in with decent expectations, and it met them. Daley and Goldstein continue to build an impressive résumé, and while this might be my least favorite of their films, but they still manage to stay airborne.

Brian Taylor

Member of the North Texas Film Critics Association, and lover of all things Cinema