“Mayday” opens on a close-up of a man wearing a flight helmet, a strip of dried blood staining his face. His orange flight suit and helmet evoke “The Martian” or “Project Hail Mary,” but this action-comedy thriller, starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, isn’t about space and the future.
Instead, in a bit of tone-resetting mischief, the writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein cut to a beckoning ocean and a cormorant nabbing a fish, buoyed by the dulcet wail of David Lee Roth on Van Halen’s “Jump.” When a couple of low-flying Navy jets upend the seabird, an intertitle puts us above the Pacific in 1987, as the Cold War begins its fifth decade.
The banter of the four pilots on a training exercise offers more hints about the film’s provenance. As does a bouncer opening a rope to let these “top guns” pass, right before one of them, Troy Kelly (Reynolds), a.k.a. Assassin, is tapped for the top-secret mission.
The Siberian forest, where Troy crash-lands after his SR-71 flight plummets, was understood by Americans as part of an inhospitable, alien place in the late 1980s: the Soviet Union. But “Mayday” is not exactly a Cold War throwback.
When “Top Gun: Maverick” arrived in 2022, it inspired ruminations about how a movie could pull off its own remembrances of things past, its own sorrows (in mourning Val Kilmer and his character Iceman). It also inspired Daley and Goldstein to tease pop culture nostalgia in this slightly different, winking way.
Living in the woods of Siberia is Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), a former K.G.B. officer. When Troy wakes in Nick’s cabin, we’re right to wonder what fresh misery he’s in for. But Nick is also a “Top Gun” superfan. With his bootlegged VHS of that 1986 hit and a worn cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” Nick yearns for the America of Maverick & Co. On his cabin wall hangs a knockoff American flag with twice as many stars and stripes. It’s a quirky touch (production design by Nora Takacs Ekberg) in a movie rife with them.
Initially, Troy mistrusts Nick. But an absurd bar brawl — unfurling to a ballad by the Polish singer Anna German — makes clear to Troy that Nick is his only way to the American embassy. Hunting this odd couple is Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski).
In what becomes a plane, train and automobile (not in that order) chase flick, Reynolds once again asserts his gift for the understated one-liner. Branagh takes pleasure in Nikolai’s skill set and mind-set. He embraces the lunatic action (as does the directors’ longtime cinematographer, Barry Peterson). But it’s in the pair’s bickering about their home countries that the wizened Nick one-ups Troy. “Don’t K.G.B. me,” Troy quips, feeling outthought.
When the duo visits Nick’s daughter, Anna (Maria Bakalova), in a grim housing tower in Moscow, we learn his pining runs deeper still. Anna is a human-rights activist, but that’s not the only reason she’s an enemy of the state.
It’s easy to discern a certain yearning on the part of the filmmakers shimmering beneath all those action set pieces. When the movie’s “I am Spartacus” moment comes — and it will come — you might even find yourself getting a bit misty at the declarations of independent thinking in the service of our still-young republic, however escapist.
Mayday Rated PG-13 for violence and action, some strong language, suggestive references and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Apple TV.
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