It’s easy to get cynical about straight-to-streaming buddy action comedies. They please the algorithms of all the major streamers, making them quite plentiful, and they might as well be written by AI. In fact, star power is not even something that gets you over the hump in your preconceived notions. Ryan Reynolds, star of the new AppleTV+ movie Mayday and a big movie star in general, has already appeared in a handful of such movies, including Red Notice and The Adam Project. These movies are not beneath stars like Reynolds, apparently; they’re only beneath us.

But fortunately we still live in a time when it is worth considering any individual movie on its own merits. And Mayday has a healthy quantity of them. It’s made with the sort of pizzazz and care borne of a true love of the medium, by writer-directors who have a number of recent hits on their resume. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are the minds behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves. They’ve carved out a space that make them kind of a poor man’s Lord & Miller, and we’re not just saying that because both come in a pair.

There’s another important name here we don’t usually talk about in the context of a buddy action comedy: the director of photography, Barry Peterson. The directors’ DP on their previous features, Peterson has really levelled up here, shooting this thing with an uncanny knack for bringing each image to life, no matter how static. If the object itself doesn’t move, the camera does. If the object moves, the camera figures out how to keep up with those movements, always placed to communicate the maximum cleanliness to the storytelling. Peterson uses split diopter shots, extreme high angles, extreme low angles, and a loving quantity of perfectly executed whip pans, adding exhilaration to the laughs contributed by Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, courtesy of Goldstein and Daley’s words.

They’ve got the mining of our cultural nostalgia down too. Mayday takes place in 1987, “40 years into the cold war,” according to an opening text that’s accompanied by Van Halen’s iconic “Jump.” Reynolds is a fighter pilot on a secret mission over Russian airspace, and back then, I guess they had a lot of 49-year-old pilots. (Reynolds makes his age work. He’s keeping himself in great shape.) When he’s shot down, Peterson’s camera follows his emergency ejection from just underneath it, shifting to assess the distance to the ground, then back up to the flaming residue and smoke trails of the craft, then down to the ground again, and then back to where the parachute itself is on fire. There’s obviously trickery involved here, but you aren’t inclined to look for the seams.

Troy Kelly miraculously has only superficial injuries, but he’s got the bigger problem of being behind enemy lines. He’s had the good fortune to land within the vicinity of a man with a hunting rifle, Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh); good fortune because “Nik” isn’t out to kill Troy or bring him to the KGB. In fact, he’s a lover of all things American, especially his bootlegged copy of Top Gun, and he’s a former KGB agent himself, meaning he’s got fighting skills, survival skills, and medical training. He’s keen to get Troy back to safety, but it’s 2,000 km to the nearest border with Finland, and the KGB knows the pilot survived the crash.

It’s amazing what a little specificity can do for a movie. The 1987 Soviet Union setting is lovingly created here, and even though it’s not, of course, actually shot in wintry Russia, you do feel the need to google it to be sure. Nik as a character presages what’s to come in the country, which was four years away from formal dissolution and from at least a decade’s break from being a global menace. Western thinking had taken root, giving the film an optimistic thrust, but a cohort of hard-liners – represented here by the dogged pursuit of KGB agent Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski) – still had enough power to give Mayday a sense of stakes.

And those stakes come in the form of a really fun cat-and-mouse game between Nik and Troy and their pursuers. The individual moments of that chase are alive with both tension and visual humour. One scene where Nik and Troy are seeking a special phone they can use to call the U.S. embassy, unmonitored, features two different tiers of characters in hiding, and their acknowledgement of each other without blowing up the other’s situation is hilarious.

Reynolds is in familiar form here, which makes him appealing but unsurprising. It’s really Branagh who is getting to work out his range, to great effect. The Russian accent is credible, in fact, the Russian itself is credible – Mayday is commendable for conducting a large percentage of the dialogue that would actually be in Russian, in Russian. The comedic instincts were always there for Branagh, and they come through here in the form of some very dry line deliveries. So maybe the biggest surprise is the physicality of the performance, which likely also relies on some trickery – Branagh is 65 after all – but probably not as much as it seems. Part of DP Peterson’s commitment to camera excellence involves filming entire action sequences straight through, and that kind of thing doesn’t work when it’s just a stunt man doing the punches and kicks.

Humour is “easy,” in the sense that if you’ve written something funny on the page, you can’t mess it up as long as you have decent performers at your disposal. But where Mayday really shines is in the ineffable area of visual humour, a collaborative effort that rewards our understanding of the character dynamics in any scene. And for all that Goldstein and Daley are demonstrably good writers, they know when to just let a moment play out for all its inherent wordless absurdity.

Mayday may be friendly to algorithms, but it is not phoned in. The effort put forth by all its collaborators allows it to hit on all the quadrants while also feeling worthy of our affections, even chipping in a little heart as well. Mayday signals anything but distress for cinematic trends that we are usually right to worry about.

 

Mayday is currently streaming on AppleTV+.