Mayday Is the 1980s Throwback Action Movie We Didn't Know We Needed
Ryan Reynolds plays a fighter pilot dropped behind enemy lines in a film that plays it 1987-straight. No irony, no winking at the camera, just genre filmmaking done properly.
Ryan Reynolds built a career on knowing winks and fourth-wall breaks. Mayday asks him to drop all of it, and the result is one of the more surprising turns of his filmography.
The Setup
Reynolds plays Troy "Assassin" Kelly, a hot-shot pilot talked into flying a spy mission over Soviet Russia. It's 1987, a year after Top Gun, and Mayday knows exactly what era it's borrowing from. His plane, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the same aircraft that inspired the X-Men's jet, is destroyed, dropping him into enemy territory with nothing but instinct to get out.
The Blackbird is brought down after a mid-air collision with a MiG-29, and Kelly ejects into hostile territory, stranded with no way home until he crosses paths with a local carpenter. Also in the cast are Maria Bakalova as Anna Ustinov, Marcin Dorocinski as Alexander Volkov and David Morse as Kelly's father Harold, with the film shot mostly in Montreal, with additional filming in Budapest, under the working title Blackbird.
Playing It Straight
What makes Mayday work is that it commits. Kenneth Branagh plays Nikolai Ustinov, a former KGB operative living alone in the woods who happens to be enamoured with American pop culture, a setup that could tip into parody in the wrong hands. Instead, the film plays its genre conventions completely straight, which is rarer than it should be in 2026.
Who Made It
Mayday is directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the duo behind Game Night and the Dungeons & Dragons film, working from their own screenplay. It's produced through Skydance Media and Reynolds's own Maximum Effort banner, with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger also producing, cinematography from Barry Peterson and a score from Colin Stetson. The film premiered on Apple TV+ on 4 September and runs 111 minutes.
The Premiere
Apple staged a full red-carpet world premiere for Mayday with Reynolds, Branagh and Bakalova all in attendance, treating it as a genuine tentpole release rather than a quiet streaming drop. Reviews out of the premiere leaned positive on the Reynolds and Branagh pairing specifically, with critics singling out their chemistry as the film's strongest asset even where the plotting itself felt familiar.
Details: Starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, set in 1987, streaming on Apple TV+, which costs $15.99 a month in Australia.
Verdict
It's the kind of confidently mid-budget, genre-first entertainment that studios rarely greenlight anymore. If you grew up on this exact flavour of Cold War action movie, Mayday delivers precisely what it promises, no more, no less, and that's the point.
