Mayday

Goldstein and Daley once again continue to surprise and impress. Reynolds and Branagh are an excellent duo, the action set pieces they star in are even more excellent, and all of it is brought to life with smart writing and a talent for filmmaking. It truly gives Reynolds' time in the Marvel universe a run for its money, as it's easy to call his pairing with Branagh here one of the best action movies of 2026.

The movie remains silly, familiar, and ultimately lacking in substantial depth. Yet its charm resides in how readily it acknowledges those limitations and keeps moving. Mayday is an unabashed popcorn movie: brisk, escapist, cleverly staged, and more soulful than its thin setup suggests.

The popcorn film proves an entertaining diversion, thanks to the mismatched-buddy comic chemistry of the two leads. It makes you hope for the hinted-at sequel in which the pair embark on a road trip through America together.

Filmmakers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the directing team behind “Game Night” and “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” have made a career out of making genre fare with an irreverent twist. They seem to be both skeptics and fans of macho 80s action movies — playing up the practical hand-to-hand combat and embracing the inherent goofiness of it all.

Nothing about Mayday seeks to reinvent the wheel, but the sense that some thought and invention has gone into both the characters and the set pieces means it soars above most entries in a streaming climate that can often feel soulless. This is an eminently watchable diversion.

At least Branagh is having a good time. And why shouldn’t he? He gets to play a Russian dude who looks like Grizzly Adams and fights like Jason Bourne. It’s a plum role for an actor who’s never really had a chance to become an action hero before, and he seizes it with relish. Once you accept the flimsy reality of the relationship between Reynolds and Branagh, it’s easy to get swept up in their lively rapport.

The odd couple of Reynolds and Branagh is amusing at the start, but once it settles into its rhythm, it wears out its novelty.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

One of the things I loved the most was the camera work and direction. The camera moves above, below and around the characters, and the transitions between locations are really smooth. There are also some shots where the camera goes through doors, windows and even walls, and it sounds weird on paper, but it actually works really well with the movement. The wide shots and high camera angles also give you a really good sense of where everything is instead of just cutting between action shots all the time. And that Blackbird scene when Troy jumps out of the plane... WOW. The way the camera follows him made it feel so real. That shot genuinely impressed me. Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh also have great chemistry together. Their scenes were easily some of my favorite parts of the movie.I was honestly having a great time for most of the first hour, but then Anna, Nikolai's daughter, showed up and there was one thing that really took me out of the movie. Honestly, we don't really care that Anna is into girls. Whyy make it necessary? It didn't really add anything to the story for me, and I felt like the movie could have easily worked without it... without the Anna subplot, this would've been a 9/10 for me. With it, I'm giving it a 6/10. Still, I had a good time with it..

Mayday throws Ryan Reynolds into the Cold War, gives him a former KGB agent to follow, and somehow Kenneth Branagh ends up being both the funniest and the most dangerous person in the movie.Reynolds is in his usual mode, cracking jokes while everything around him explodes, but it works here because Branagh goes in the opposite direction, with dry humor, a straight face, and the energy of someone who clearly knows how to kill you with whatever happens to be **** duo works really well. There are planes, chases, bar fights, improvised traps, and Top Gun being treated almost like a historical document.When the movie tries to talk about patriotism and the Cold War, it becomes much more superficial. But when it just embraces being an action buddy comedy, it’s very easy to have fun with.I just wasn’t expecting to discover that Kenneth Branagh was one script away from becoming a Soviet John Wick.

(Mauro Lanari) Deadpool with his increasingly close-set eyes in a double buddy movie that is also lesbian, positioned between "Bullet Train" and "Bullet Plane" ("Fight or Flight"). For anyone who hasn't had enough.

"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad."