Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh star in this goofy but entertaining action-comedy bromance set in the cold war 80s, when it seemed every red-blooded young guy in America adored Top Gun and wanted to be a US Navy fighter pilot. It’s got some outrageous close-quarter fight scenes – and who knew Branagh could bust out martial arts moves? Is he going to follow Bob Odenkirk into an unexpected action movie career? The final sequences of automotive mayhem in and around Moscow might remind you of the heady days of Roger Moore as James Bond.
Reynolds is Troy Kelly (callsign “Assassin”), a supercool fighter pilot in 1987, who is always doing brave and brilliant stuff that isn’t in the rulebook, and cracking wise in the accepted Reynolds manner. But when his spy plane is shot down deep inside snowy and forested Soviet territory, Troy awakens from his coma to find himself in the log cabin of retired KGB man Nikolai Ustinov, cheerfully played by Branagh, who is a secret fan of all things American and obsessively rewatches Top Gun on samizdat VHS. He suggests to the stunned Troy that he simply stays in his cabin, watching the film with him, until the cold war is over.
At this stage, this movie could have started to resemble Stephen King’s Misery, or Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust in which Tony Last has to read Dickens eternally to a madman in the jungle. But Troy and Nikolai wind up making a break for it together, with much hijinks in speeding cars and of course, in accordance with a tradition as old as cinema itself, a rattling train from which they are soon going to have to jump. They even end up on an aircraft which is going to be very hazardous once people starting shooting inside it, while all the time naturally quarrelling and sniping at each other. And of course they are being pursued by a hardfaced Russian security operative called Volkov (played by Marcin Dorocinski). It’s all very silly, and considering that there is an unexpected queer theme at the end, I felt that writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein missed a trick in not reviving the gay theories around Top Gun. But there are laughs, stunts and wacky chemistry between Reynolds and Branagh.
• Mayday is on Apple TV from 4 September
