Mayday

It's a Cold War action-comedy from John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the Game Night guys who also did Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Ryan Reynolds plays Troy "Assassin" Kelly, a cocky Navy pilot flying a black-bag mission over Russian airspace that goes sideways almost immediately. He gets stranded behind the Iron Curtain and stumbles into Nikolai Ustinov, a burnt-out ex-KGB man played by Kenneth Branagh, who has a weakness for American pop culture and no obvious reason to help. Maria Bakalova and Marcin Dorociński fill out the rest of the board. First act is basically: pilot goes down, pilot meets Russian, pilot and Russian have to move.

Branagh. That's the pitch. He's playing a genre part most actors would coast through, and instead he's doing a whole crumpled, funny, specifically Russian performance that keeps stealing scenes from a movie star who normally doesn't let anyone steal anything. Reynolds does the Reynolds thing — motormouth, wounded ego, punchline every eight seconds — but he's calibrated it down a notch, which helps. Daley and Goldstein know how to shoot a set piece so you can actually see it, a skill that's gotten rare, and they lean into a genuine 1980s Cannon-adjacent tone without smirking at it. The Bakalova scenes have some real snap.

It evaporates on contact with air. You can already feel the reviews saying "pretty good, forgot it by Monday," and they're right. The plot mechanics are made of the exact parts you'd predict from the logline, in the exact order. Reynolds' shtick has calcified into a brand at this point, and if you've had enough of it in one movie you've had enough of it in all of them. Some of the Russia-set material is doing the thing where a Prague soundstage stands in for the entire Eastern Bloc. And there's a soft, streaming-movie quality to the whole thing — competently lit, pleasantly paced, forgettable by design.

If you liked Game Night and want that team applied to a bigger budget with airplanes, you'll have a nice time. If you're the person who puts on The Nice Guys or True Lies while folding laundry, this slots right in. People who need their action-comedy to actually surprise them — anyone still chasing the Shane Black high — are going to check their phone by minute forty. And if Reynolds' delivery has started to grate on you in a way it didn't five years ago, nothing here is going to un-grate it.

BACKGROUND TV is the honest read. The craft is real — Branagh is doing legitimate work, the directors know their way around a chase — but the ambition tops out at "a good version of exactly what you thought this would be." Nothing about the writing lingers after the credits. There's no lecture problem here, no thematic megaphone; the movie has the opposite issue, which is that it isn't really arguing for anything, it's just arranging familiar pieces with above-average taste. That's a perfectly fine thing to have running while you fold laundry or wait for a food delivery. It's not a thing you clear your Saturday for. Put it on, look up for the Branagh scenes, don't feel bad if you miss ten minutes checking your phone.