Mayday

Mayday is a 2026 American action comedy written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein for Apple Original Films, Skydance Media and Ryan Reynolds' Maximum Effort. Set at the height of the Cold War, it follows hotshot U.S. Navy pilot Lieutenant Troy "Assassin" Kelly (Reynolds), who is sent on a top-secret reconnaissance mission deep into Russian territory. The operation implodes, and Troy finds himself stranded behind enemy lines with no extraction, no cover story and no idea who — if anyone — is coming for him.

Discovered by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a gruff ex-KGB agent with an unashamed appetite for American culture, Troy assumes he is finished. Instead, the two men strike an uneasy bargain, and the film becomes a chase across hostile territory in which the biggest obstacle is not the pursuing Soviet apparatus but the two travellers' own convictions about each other. Marcin Dorociński, Maria Bakalova and David Morse fill out the ensemble on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Daley and Goldstein play the material as a genuine action picture rather than a spoof: the aerial sequences were built on research with real SR-71 Blackbird pilots and shot in part with live aerial photography, while the comedy comes from character friction rather than winking at the audience. Mayday began streaming on Apple TV on September 4, 2026.

At its centre, Mayday is an argument against inherited enmity. Troy begins the film as a true believer — certain which side of the war is the right one, certain that Soviets are backward and evil — and the story's real engine is the slow erosion of that certainty by the inconvenient humanity of the man keeping him alive.

Crucially, the film refuses the standard Cold War payoff. It ends in a warm place emotionally while landing in a skeptical one politically: there is no triumph of the good guys over the reds, and the heroism the film ultimately endorses is not the kind that shoots down a MiG. Daley and Goldstein use the most flag-waving genre available — the jet-jockey adventure — to suggest that geopolitical rivalry is both superficial and futile, and that loyalty to a specific human being is a sturdier value than loyalty to a narrative you were handed.

Running underneath is a story about fatherhood and the men we choose as fathers, which is where the film's sentiment lives and where its comedy finally gives way to something quieter.

The optimistic reading. The ending is straightforwardly feel-good: two men from opposite sides prove that friendship outranks ideology, and Troy's final decision is a moral graduation. Under this view the film is a humanist fable, and its refusal of a triumphalist victory is simply the price of a more grown-up warmth.

Mayday arrives as a streaming-era test case: a big, glossy, practically-shot action comedy made for Apple TV rather than theatres, and critics repeatedly framed it in those terms — one reviewer noted that while the film is not the most narratively audacious, it is a strong reminder that a streaming comedy can look as good as any blockbuster. Deadline's review pitched Reynolds and Branagh as being in "Top Gun form," making explicit the lineage the film is both honouring and arguing with.

That argument is the culturally interesting part. The Cold War jet movie is one of American cinema's most reliably jingoistic forms, and Mayday borrows its whole vocabulary — callsigns, recon missions, dogfights — while declining its politics. Rather than closing with the good guys beating the Soviets, it lands somewhere more skeptical and advocates a different kind of heroism, positioning itself against the Top Gun tradition even as it competes with it on spectacle.

It also functions as a genre repositioning for both leads: Branagh, the Shakespearean actor-director, doing his own stunts as a gone-to-seed KGB man, and Reynolds using his Maximum Effort banner to place his familiar comic persona inside a sincere period adventure with an emotional core about fatherhood.

Reception was mixed to positive. The broad consensus tracked by aggregators credits the film's humour and its two leads more than its script: coverage of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews framed it as a case of comedy rescuing the material, and reviewers in Variety, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter largely treated the Reynolds–Branagh chemistry as the reason to watch.

Praised: Branagh's performance and his physical commitment, including his own stunt work; the Reynolds–Branagh double act; the aerial sequences and overall production polish, with the film held up as proof that a streaming comedy can look as good as any theatrical blockbuster; and the unexpectedly sincere fatherhood material.

Criticised: narrative conventionality — even sympathetic reviewers conceded it is not narratively audacious — and, from the rotten side of the ledger, the period comedy. One critic dismissed it as "a mirthless mess," and another wrote that for all its retro jokes about the '80s, the film "still hasn't figured out how to make the era funny."

Divisive: the ending. Viewers expecting a conventional Cold War victory found the skeptical, non-triumphalist resolution either the film's most interesting choice or a deflating anticlimax after two hours of jet-fuelled spectacle.

Verdict: a handsome, likeable, star-driven action comedy that overperforms emotionally and underperforms structurally — carried across the line by Branagh.