For better or for worse, the Cold War action-comedy lives! 35 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have meshed the longstanding Odd Couple road trip with Iron Curtain hijinks and modern action sensibilities for a surprisingly solid but conceptually unexpected genre-blurring film. The pair are beyond seasoned comedic writer-directors, with the exceptional Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons (among other films) packed into their oeuvre, yet the novel mashup breaks new ground for the duo.
Cold War comedies aren’t unheard of, but they were also never a dominant trend within the legacy of the era’s USSA/USA-centric cinema. A number of the comedies tackling these topics were satires, like Jack Arnold’s The Mouse That Roared (1959), Stanley Kubrick’s masterful Dr. Strangelove (1964), Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming (1966), or the more recent The Death of Stalin (2017). Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961) walks a more mainstream comedic line, and there are plenty actioners, spy films, and political thrillers that feature the Soviet Union, but a Cold War buddy action-comedy is a relatively rare piece of film history. For the most part, yet with some relevant caveats, it works.
Ryan Reynolds Hits Common Notes With Comedic Success
In Mayday, US Navy pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) gets shot down over the Soviet Union while flying a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. His plane is destroyed, he has no way to contact home, and he finds himself disavowed by the U.S. on his Black Ops mission. Kelly wakes to find himself greeted by an overly cheery ex-KGB operative, Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh). Ustinov is enamored with the suspicious Kelly, claiming to love America and Americans. His plan? Save Kelly by sneaking him out of the Soviet Union, while Kelly gets Ustinov and his daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova) safely back to the States with the U.S.S.R. hot on their tails.
A Cold War buddy action-comedy is a relatively rare piece of film history. For the most part, yet with some relevant caveats, it works.
Ryan Reynolds plays Kelly firmly planted in the vein of just about every character he inhabits these days, from Deadpool to The Adam Project and beyond: a sarcastic-but-charming jerk who comes around. It’s at a point where you could substitute any of these characters for each other, but Reynolds has strong comedic timing and enough likability for the well-trod archetype to remain welcome on our screens. It’s balanced out by Branagh’s ex-KGB operative who loves all things America. I’m sure there are a number of Russian actors who could have turned in a good performance, but Branagh’s accent work is solid, and he admirably balances the silliness of the US-obsession and his serious combat skill well.
A Novel, Fun Cinematic Oddity
While the drive to hybridize rarely meshed genres together largely works and is entertaining for the most part, it does introduce some tonal balancing issues and plot complications that are worth examination. Reynolds and Branagh have good chemistry, but it is absent the consistent level of comedic elements that populate franchises like Rush Hour or Lethal Weapon. The action sequences work well with strong stunt work in both melee combat and driving, but action moments aren’t as consistently prevalent as we’d like. The complex of factors adds oddities for the political Realpolitik of the setup as well. It’s conceptually odd to have a Cold War anything in our era, and it’s a particularly odd choice given the amplified red-baiting and political demonization that are currently happening in the United States. Does that context impede its success? No, but it’s hard to see what demographic is being aimed at.
There’s also an interesting utilization of modern moral standards that populate the film, such as the inclusion of an LGBTQ character as a mechanism to criticize the USSR on its rights record. Supporting LGBTQ rights is right, good, and welcome, but it’s also a weird political point to make as an anti-communist criticism when 1980s America was also notoriously bad on that topic. The film does criticize the United States, including its apathy towards citizens as well, so it narrowly escapes being the pure propaganda that Cold War movies often are. That’s great, but these elements aren’t quite developed enough or incisive enough to make full sense of their inclusion.
Altogether, Mayday is fairly solid as far as action comedies go. Ryan Reynolds is playing the character that Ryan Reynolds plays, but he does it well and it hasn’t quite worn out its welcome yet. Kenneth Branagh might not be the most intuitive choice for his counterpart, but he turns in another excellent performance, and the duo lands a seemingly effortless pairing. The atypical elements are an admirable novelty, but the film struggles to balance all these different elements while some of the choices don’t quite make sense on their own merits. It’s an engaging enough action-comedy, but not much else.
Reviews