MAYDAY (2026)

What if the United States and the Soviet Union starred opposite each other as a period-piece, action-comedy, road movie, odd couple? You might say Shut up. As in it’s Midnight Run (1988) with a Cold War twist. The post World War II, one-time allied superpowers are this year’s perfect strangers, reluctantly working together for their own survival or sorts. For those of you out there who are unfamiliar, at the time Mayday (2026) takes place (1987), the two nations couldn’t partake in regular ol’ military combat due to the fear of a nuclear apocalypse, and so from 1945 to 1991, they battled via propaganda, spying and constant economic competition. It was a simpler time with a simpler onscreen enemy for the west. The unlikely capitalist and communist mismatched pair is nothing new in film, but damn if respective stand-ins Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh make it new… again. It’s also a welcome love letter to 80s buddy comedies both in tone and humour, think Spies Like Us (1985), Real Men (1987) and Red Heat (1988). Branagh steals the show outright with a rare light-hearted outing as straight man ex-KGB agent Nikolai Ustinov, who’s obsessed with US culture and gets bonus points for his convincing fight choreography. Reynolds is Reynolds, this time playing Troy Kelly an America-first fighter jet pilot who, while on a covert recon mission, is shot down over Russian airspace and taken captive by the Top Gun (1986) loving Nikolai, who dreams of eating at a McDonalds one day. The motivations are oh-so-80s for these two knuckleheads stuck together for this throwback cross-country adventure. Now, it’s distractingly aware of it’s own homage (enough with the Bruce Springsteen already), but who doesn’t love a decent, no-holds-barred, big budget spy parody, in spite of our current-collective Reynolds fatigue. But there’s a reason for our exhaustion with the overexposed and conveniently Canadian star; sourcing chemistry with cast mates is second nature to him and he brings it once again. The buddy-cop genre depends on co-star camaraderie for the essential and constant bickering between its straight man, with his deadpan delivery, and his counterpart’s frantic outbursts. You might say it’s nothing new, but we’d argue that the movie is happily recycling and revelling in its nostalgic pairing of quarreling nation-stand-ins with tropes aplenty. And it proudly touches on the messiness of the us versus them mentality and washes away a tiny bit of the nagging moral quandary of war. It’s all well and fine and not what we’re after when we imagine the warring nations as a mismatched comedy duo, but it’s balanced enough. You might say it adds some gravitas to the fun. You might say it belittles the point. You might say Shut the fuck up.    

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