Mayday (Apple TV)

From the opening minutes, it’s clear that Mayday doesn’t quite want to settle for being a standard rescue-and-survival story. It wants atmosphere too. It wants cold, fog, political unease and that slightly too tidy version of danger streaming often serves up when the budget needs to look bigger than the conscience. Sam Hargrave, who directed the film, comes from a world where action is meant to hit you in the neck (Extraction on Netflix), and you can tell. He has worked before with the kind of physical intensity that makes the camera feel like a person who has just sprinted up three flights of stairs and arrived late. Here he aims for something more restrained, but still with a clear sense of movement and pressure. Still, it lacks a good deal of nerve compared with his earlier work.

That still isn’t enough to hide the fact that the screenplay — written by M.S. Dhoni, Aaron Rabin and Jim Hecht — is constantly wrestling with its own identity. The story places us in a borderland of snow, mistrust and the hum of the Cold War, where an American pilot and a Russian ex-KGB agent with a pathological weakness for all things American have to find a way out of something that quickly becomes bigger than them. There’s something classic about that setup: two people who should, in theory, be each other’s opposites, but are forced to cooperate because the world around them has turned hostile and absurd. It could have been tight, almost claustrophobic. Instead, we get a film that often seems unsure how seriously it wants to take its own premise.

Ryan Reynolds is one of those actors I usually have a fairly soft spot for. He can land a line with timing that makes even the most worn-out irony feel freshly washed. He has a gift for turning sarcasm into a working condition, and that’s not nothing. But in Mayday, his comic register is used so insistently that it almost undermines the tension the film is trying to build. It’s as if every scene comes with a small jolting reminder that we’re also supposed to smile. And sure, thanks. But maybe not when someone is lost in an icy no-man’s-land and the film is otherwise asking us to take their situation seriously.

Reynolds isn’t the problem in itself. It’s the balance. Or rather: the lack of it. He plays with his usual mix of charm and weary worldly wisdom, but the film doesn’t give him room for that tone to develop organically. It becomes too “Ryan Reynolds-y,” as one is almost tempted to say with a little sigh. It’s a strange thing to blame an actor for being himself, but in this case it feels as though the film hired him for exactly that and then still didn’t quite want to live with the consequences.

Kenneth Branagh does what he always does best: he throws himself into the role with an intensity that makes even the shakiest material seem a little more dignified. His Russian accent is obvious, theatrical and a touch overdone, but that’s also part of his strength as an actor: he can carry a character who might otherwise collapse under the weight of his own symbolism. Branagh has always had a weakness for the grand and the emphatic, and here it actually fits reasonably well. He isn’t subtle, but he isn’t indifferent either. And that, in itself, is a quality at a time when so many performances feel like something approved by an algorithm with a good hair day.

What really makes Mayday strange is its emotional and political orientation. There’s a noticeable warmth in the film’s portrayal of Russian settings and relationships, which almost makes it feel like a kind of counter-narrative to the more familiar American self-image. The Americans often come across as more self-absorbed, more tactical, more concerned with fitting things into their own little logic. The Russians, by contrast, are given a humanity that feels deliberately foregrounded. That can absolutely be legitimate. Films are allowed to shift perspective and challenge habits. But here it becomes so obvious that you can almost hear the screenplay’s political ambitions rattling in the background.

I know it can be tempting to read that kind of thing as pure propaganda, and maybe that goes too far. But at several points the film feels like a diplomatic gesture disguised as genre entertainment. It wants to say something about community, about warmth, about who is actually the most human in the room. And that’s fine. The problem is simply that it does it with such an obvious hand that it loses some of its credibility. When a film tries to be warm on command, it quickly gets a little sweaty at the brow. Not charmingly sweaty. More like: “We got the message, thanks.”

There are stretches where Mayday works. It has a sure grip on pace, and it knows how to keep a minimum level of tension alive. There’s snow crunching underfoot. There are looks exchanged as if every word could come at a cost. There’s a sense that something could go wrong at any moment, and that’s exactly what a thriller should be able to deliver. But the film keeps leaning on its own lightness. It never quite wants to go down into the genre’s dark, dirty end and often ends up far too light. It would rather be neat, smooth and accessible than credible and infected. Like the relationship between the US and Russia back then — and now. And maybe that’s precisely why it never really bites.

You can also tell that Mayday was made for an audience that doesn’t necessarily demand too much. That’s not an insult, just a fact. Streaming has created an entire category of works designed to be watched without disturbing the rest of the evening. They need to be enough. Not too much, not too little. Like a sandwich from 7-Eleven. Like sparkling water with a light fizz. Mayday lands in that category with a certain elegance, but also with a rather sad predictability. It’s entertaining enough to finish, but not sharp enough to be remembered for anything beyond its tonal confusion.

And that’s a shame, because there’s something promising in the idea, and I was actually looking forward to it. There’s something in the meeting of the frozen landscape, the two actors and the almost absurd international situation that could have produced a more distinctive film. Instead, we get a decent but also rather easy-to-digest affair. It wants to be more than lightweight popcorn entertainment, but never quite dares to leap out of the safe form. The result is a film that slips neatly through the system and leaves very little resistance behind. There are very few WTF moments, and usually that’s fine if the premise can carry them. Here, it just can’t.

So no, Mayday is not a disaster. It’s just another example of the modern streaming film that delivers exactly enough to avoid total disappointment and exactly too little to spark excitement. I’m not angry at it. I’m just a little tired on its behalf, and on behalf of nearly all VOD films. They’re often made to compete on equal footing with cinema blockbusters, but far too rarely do. And maybe that’s the most honest reaction: a film can be competent, charming and well-acted, and still feel like something already forgotten while the credits are still rolling.
I think we’re allowed to expect a bit more from these titles.

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"Mayday" can be seen on Apple TV from 4 September 2026.