‘Mayday’ film review: Kenneth Branagh plays ‘a good Russian’ for a change as a former KGB officer who loves Top Gun and fights like Liam Neeson

A film about a downed U.S. Navy pilot and a former KGB officer who become friends while trying to escape the Soviet Union in 1987 is now streaming on Apple TV. Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh once again plays a Soviet citizen — hardly new territory in his career — while Ryan Reynolds sticks to his familiar persona. The film was commissioned by Skydance Media, a studio that reportedly has close ties to the Trump administration. Critic Eduard Zhuravlev examines what a campy, cliché-ridden Hollywood portrayal of the Soviet Union can look like in 2026.

It’s 1987. Dashing U.S. Navy pilot Troy Kelly (Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds) accepts a secret CIA mission: fly a reconnaissance plane into the Arkhangelsk region to find out whether the Soviet leadership is building missile silos there. The mission goes wrong. Kelly’s plane is hit, and he is forced to eject over the snow-covered taiga. In the forest, the wounded American is rescued by bearded carpenter Nikolai Ustinov (Irish actor Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB officer who is anti-Soviet and a huge fan of the action movie Top Gun. Ustinov agrees to help Kelly escape; a ruthless “Red Army” led by “head of internal security” Alexander Volkov (Polish actor Marcin Dorocinski) is already hunting him.

Mayday may seem like just another streaming action movie destined to fade from memory before the credits finish rolling. These movies usually star some Chris — Evans (The Gray Man, Ghosted), Pratt (Mercy, The Tomorrow War), or Hemsworth (Extraction, Extraction 2). This time, though, viewers got lucky — and not because the lead happens to be a Ryan. Reynolds has plenty of streaming junk on his own résumé.

Mayday is a funny, propulsive buddy road comedy that holds its own even against 1980s genre classics. It also reimagines the caricatured Soviet clichés Hollywood produced in abundance during the Reagan era, from Red Dawn and Rocky IV to Red Heat and Rambo III. That makes it a politically charged film.

John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein wrote and directed the film. Their credits include the reboot of the 1980s comedy series Vacation, the hilarious and hard-edged comedy Game Night, the brisk fantasy Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and the screenplays for Horrible Bosses and Spider-Man: Homecoming. The pair could easily rank among Hollywood’s most skilled comedy filmmakers working today.

Skydance Media is another important “author” here — the same studio that merged with Paramount, plans to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and reportedly has close ties to the Trump administration. Its résumé includes not only the Terminator and Mission: Impossible sequels and a good half of the mass-market schlock starring the Chrises mentioned above, but also films about the complicated relationship between East and West, including The Gorge and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Branagh, incidentally, directed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and played its main villain, Russian oligarch Viktor Cherevin, who plots a terrorist attack on Wall Street. Branagh, an award-winning filmmaker known for adaptations of Shakespeare and Agatha Christie — plus one Marvel outing — has played a Russian character roughly once every six years. After Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit came Tenet, in which the Irish actor played another Russian oligarch, Andrei Sator. International relations are almost beside the point for Sator: dying and bent on revenge, he is prepared to destroy the world. Now Branagh has unexpectedly played “a good Russian.” True, Ustinov is a former KGB officer who tortured people on the job, but the filmmakers show little interest in that detail.

This is one of the first roles in Branagh’s career that has asked him to throw punches. The 65-year-old Irishman does a remarkably convincing Liam Neeson impression in action scenes, at times staged with the choreographic swagger of Atomic Blonde and the John Wick films. In one scene, filmed almost entirely without cuts, the unflappable comrade takes out a group of volunteer patrolmen with a pool rack to the tune of Belaya cheremukha; in another, he dispatches an entire train car full of Red Army soldiers — literally.

Branagh’s unexpected performance — his character recalls Robin Williams’s Soviet saxophonist in Moscow on the Hudson — easily overshadows Reynolds’s efforts. Troy Kelly is yet another exhausting, chatty wisecracker in Reynolds’s career; the actor has not dropped the persona even off camera in roughly 15 years. Still, the two actors have chemistry to rival Deadpool and Wolverine.

The filmmakers bring plenty of wit of their own. For starters, Mayday is both the international distress signal Kelly transmits and simply “a day in May” — the final showdown unfolds on Red Square in the middle of the Victory Day parade.

Moscow was filmed in Budapest, as usual, but with respect and humor. Ustinov drinks moonshine and eats bear meat, but the clichés are played for laughs rather than treated seriously. The actors playing Russian characters either speak Russian without a foreign accent or clearly make an effort. A Party apparatchik keeps The Atheist’s Dictionary and The Luzhin Defense at his dacha; a village grandmother keeps a jar of chicory on a shelf. There is even a Wes Anderson-style montage of a ride in a Zhiguli past Stalinist skyscrapers, Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, and a combined heat and power plant — all set to Bruce Springsteen.

Volkov, a revanchist played with impish gusto by Polish actor Marcin Dorocinski — who also played chess player Vasily Borgov in The Queen’s Gambit and the unnamed captain of the sunken submarine Sevastopol in the latest Mission: Impossible films — keeps a portrait of Chernenko in his office. Before you have time to think the filmmakers are off by two years, Chernenko is replaced by Gorbachev. “I didn’t want to hang a portrait of the man who’s destroying my country,” Volkov says. He dreams of restoring the empire and putting an end to glasnost.

At the same time, the filmmakers urge people to get along, discard propaganda slogans, and stop equating “Party policy” with individual citizens. At first, Kelly says, “Silence is complicity,” and calls everyone living in the Soviet Union part of the problem. He gradually changes his mind both about supposedly faceless Soviet people and about American democracy, after learning that his father developed cancer from asbestos exposure. Ustinov also revises his view of America, which had been shaped by the militaristic propaganda in Top Gun.

The filmmakers’ love for the biggest hit of 1986 is, of course, another meta-joke. It is hard to imagine a KGB officer born in the 1920s — even a former one — watching a bootleg VHS tape of an action movie about young, muscular pilots facing unidentified MiGs 100 times a year. The joke seems intended to remind us that ideological manifestos can be found in pop culture, not just in scientific communism classes.

Skydance Media also made Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel released 36 years after the original — and the highest-grossing film of Tom Cruise’s career. In 1986, Ustinov had to watch the movie on a bootleg VHS tape (“You could go to prison for that!”); by 2022, Maverick was playing in theaters near Arkhangelsk through gray-market distribution. The franchise makes a fitting symbol: a book about the brief period without a Cold War could well be titled “From Top Gun to Top Gun.”