From Russia With Love: Film Review of Mayday
★★★☆
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Top Gun was an incredibly popular film and, some may argue, a significant cultural phenomenon. It even spawned a sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, thirty-six years after the original. With incredibly well-staged battle scenes, state-of-the-art military technology, and the independent audacity of a—well, a maverick—at its heart, this movie is a total man cave necessity.
Top Gun references are all over the new film Mayday, a sort of cold-war thriller, buddy guys, fish-out-of-water mash-up. Top Gun’s story of a courageous and defiant aviator striving to become the best Navy fighter pilot who thumbs his nose at the system and defies authority hit a nerve with audiences. It was sort of a Western in the sky featuring Maverick (Tom Cruise) as the gunslinger working to beat the bad guys (the Russians) his own way, personifying the myth of the Western hero as of a fiercely independent man who needs no one to tell him how to do his job. Resonating with the mythos of the Western hero in all his glory, Top Gun: Maverick was a guy’s guy sort of movie.
The original Top Gun is the raison d’etre for one of the film Mayday’s heroes, Nick (Kenneth Branagh), a retired Russian KGB agent who dreams of becoming an American. The film also doubles as a linchpin for the story’s main conceit.
Mayday begins with a close-up of a pilot waking from the scene of a crash who sees an intruder at the crash site. When he passes out from his injuries, the camera cuts to the intertitle “Somewhere in the Pacific” as four American fighter jets go through a battle exercise. Afterwards, pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) pulls a daring Maverick-type move to save one of his crewmates.
Troy is subsequently recruited to fly a top-secret black ops reconnaissance mission over the Russian hinterlands. Their plane is shot down and Kelly awakens after the crash (the opening sequence). He sees an intruder at the crash site but passes out before he can react.
He awakes tied to a bed in a small cabin owned by Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh) to see Tom Cruise’s face on a Top Gun poster. The décor in the cabin is puzzling to Kelly. A homemade American flag (with far too many stars), McDonald’s ads, and the Top Gun poster adorn the walls. Nikolai enters from the freezing cold and tells Kelly he is an ex-KGB agent and that he adores the U.S. and would like to move there some day. He insists that Kelly call him Nick and tells him he wants to help him, but that he must rest and let his wounds heal first.
Kelly persuades Nick to untie him and escapes to a bar where the locals start to beat him up. Nick enters, and in one of the most humorously choreographed fight sequences since Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, saves Kelly.
Back at the cabin, Kelly tells Nick if he helps him get to the border, he will get him asylum to the U.S. With an ultra-nasty KGB agent Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski) on their tails, the two take off on their mission to get back to America. Using the bag of spy tricks he learned while in the KGB along with his knowledge of the landscape, Nick leads Kelly through another breathtaking battle on a train, a burglary of a luxury dacha, and a James Bond/Rube Goldberg type escape from a Moscow apartment. The spy raft and stunts are cleverly conceived and executed and as entertaining as any James Bond gadgetry.
After pilfering a secure phone line form a wealthy resort home in a scene strongly reminiscent of Richard Lester’s Pink Panther films, Troy is able to get hold of the U.S. Embassy. The ambassador tells Troy because he was part of a top-secret operation, the U.S. cannot openly aid him. Instead, he must come to the embassy in Moscow for protection. Things get complicated when Troy is informed that granted asylum status for Nick will be impossible.
The two travel to Moscow where Nick meets up with his estranged daughter Anna (Maria Bakalova) who is part of a resistance group. When the KGB follows him, Nick employs ingenious techniques for escaping the building and foiling the pursuit. The next is the Soviet May Day celebration, and Nick and Troy start driving to the embassy, but things get complicated when Volkov closes in.
Mayday is an interesting blend of hair-raising aeronautical stunts, slyly ironic and intricately choreographed fight scenes, self-referential (and somewhat self-deprecating) Top Gun references as well as the glib sort of buddy film repartee reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Mayday also showcases some of the best ingenious sort of homemade technological gadgets since MacGyver.
In short, Mayday has the state-of-the-art technology of F1, the slapstick comedy of a The Three Musketeers in its fight scenes, the swagger of a Western shoot-em-up, and the tongue-in-cheek humor of a The Sting, but what puts Mayday a cut above is the presence of Kenneth Branagh, and—to a lesser degree—that of Ryan Reynolds.
Branagh’s Nick combines a laconic matter-of-factness with the air of a wistful dreamer when he speaks of driving cross-country across America in a recreational vehicle or tasting his first Big Mac. His guilt over the atrocities he committed as a KGB agent and the angst he feels over his failed relationship with his daughter does not drown his self-assurance or his optimism. It is a beautifully understated performance. His deadpan delivery and comic timing are superb.
Reynolds embodies a different sort of humor. His style of ironic delivery seems very self-conscious. Some of his delivery, like the scene where he is trading barbs with his co-pilot Sanders (Louis Cancelmi) or hanging out with his top-gun buddies has kind a sophomoric charm but seems juvenile compared to Nick’s urbanity, professionalism, and sophistication.
The frenemy relationship of the two protagonists brushes up against thematics of geopolitics and fear and loathing of otherness. When Nick and Troy are taken in and fed by a poor Russian family, Troy remarks how surprised he is. Nick retorts that not all Russians are like he was.
In turn, Nick is amazed when he discovers the Americans will do nothing to save Troy, on of their own, a ham-handed attempt to demonstrate no one, not even the U.S., is perfect, a point underlined Troy’s father, who is dying from cancer caused by years of exposure to asbestos, which the U.S was aware of, but failed to act upon.
Mayday is a beautifully shot film, full of everything an adventure filmgoer could want, but with that little something extra. The physical humor, the MacGyver ingenuity, the guns, jets, tanks, and nuclear missiles, and the bromance angle make this a very enjoyable and entertaining film. The superficial nod toward the conceit of the power of humanity is not terribly insightful, but the screenwriters are also smart enough to keep it out of the way of the action.
All in all, this is a fun and entertaining film with something for everyone—especially the dwellers of the mancave.
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