Mayday lands on Apple TV with a simple pitch and a hard sell: Ryan Reynolds plays Troy Kelly, a hotshot naval pilot who ejects during a secret spy mission and wakes up trapped behind enemy lines in Soviet Russia. Kenneth Branagh plays the former KGB agent who patches him up, hides him in a remote cabin and keeps calling himself Nick.
That pairing is the reason to pay attention now. The film is set in 1987, runs 1 hour 50 minutes and carries a PG-13 rating, but its hook is the old-school buddy-movie chemistry between Reynolds and Branagh, built around a rescue story that starts with Kelly tied to a bed after he is wounded in the crash. The timing matters because this kind of action-comedy used to fill multiplexes and now turns up on streaming, here on Apple TV.
Troy Kelly is not just any pilot. He is “Assassin,” and the movie keeps him moving fast: he is told he had to be restrained while surgery was done on his leg without anesthesia, he is asked to stay in the cabin “just until the Cold War dies down,” and he briefly sets his would-be savior on fire while trying to escape. The script gives Branagh the best deadpan in the film, including the line that he has never had McDonald’s but suspects he would love it, and the two actors make the odd-couple setup feel more alive than the premise suggests.
That is also where Mayday shows its limits. The action is frequently terrific, from a foot chase through Red Square to a final battle aboard a plane with a very open door, and there is a delirious sequence where Kelly tries to outrun flaming debris until his parachute catches fire. But the movie is also working from a familiar blueprint, with the pilot-and-guide setup, the cold-war escape route and the banter all pointing back to the same kind of action-comedy buddy movies it wants to revive. It does enough of its own work to keep moving, even if parts of it feel assembled from pieces the genre has used before.
That balance is why Mayday should travel well on Apple TV: it is slick, fast and easy to enter, even if it is not pretending to reinvent the form. The unanswered question is not whether it has the speed or the chemistry; it is how far an audience wants a streaming-era throwback to go before nostalgia starts to look like the main attraction. It arrives Friday, Sept. 4, and the movie’s real test will be whether Reynolds and Branagh can make an old formula feel new enough to matter again.
