In one of the more stunning turn of events in 2026, I had a great time with Mayday. A Ryan Reynolds-led straight-to-streaming action movie on Apple TV+ is basically the opposite of a sales pitch for me, with every element of that sentence somehow getting worse the more I think about it. The only thing less noteworthy than Reynolds’ output this side of Mississippi Grind (absent Deadpool) has been the track record of straight-to-streaming action movies, and Apple TV+’s action slate in particular.
Mayday follows in the footsteps of Fountain of Youth, The Gorge, Wolfs, The Instigators, Argylle and Ghosted, which might be one of the foulest runs of action movies a studio has ever associated itself with. But Apple also attached this one to Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the duo behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and probably the most consistently talented and genuinely fun action filmmakers they’ve worked with yet. Throw in Kenneth Branagh and some action sequences that actually look better than your run-of-the-mill streamer, and somehow you get a movie that really works.
The movie follows U.S. Navy pilot Troy Kelly (Reynolds), who crash-lands in Russia during the height of the Cold War and finds himself stranded behind enemy lines. He’s eventually saved by ex-KGB officer Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), who has become disillusioned with the government he once served and believes the people in power have used government to divide cultures rather than unite them. The two become unlikely partners in a cat-and-mouse chase to reach the U.S. embassy before the Russian government can track them down.
What’s surprising is how much Mayday manages to smuggle into that fairly familiar setup. There’s a dash of food-for-thought cynicism about American self-righteousness here that I thought was genuinely daring relative to its contemporaries, especially considering this is a Ryan Reynolds action movie destined to reach more eyeballs than most Apple TV+ originals. It uses the Top Gun mythology and pastiche as a Trojan horse, with Nikolai’s love for the movie serving as a representation of the American freedoms he romanticizes, before putting Troy in situations where he has to confront the day-to-day lives and struggles of ordinary people living under genuinely oppressive leadership.
And it never becomes especially preachy about it. Troy and Nikolai spend an evening with an impoverished Russian family whose child lives with his grandparents because his parents can’t afford to support him, before later encountering Nikolai’s daughter, who’s on the run while fighting for humanitarian causes and living as a gay woman in a country whose government doesn’t recognize her rights. In between, there are long action sequences through train cars, and trucks carrying nuclear weapons in one hell of a climactic chase. This movie kinda has everything, but it doesn’t feel overstuffed.
That’s probably Goldstein and Daley’s biggest strength. Like Dungeons & Dragons, they keep things moving and light on their feet while still embedding more prescient ideas about how we treat each other, and more importantly, how we should see and acknowledge one another. There’s a real earnestness underneath all the spectacle that I wasn’t expecting to find here.
Reynolds is still doing some of the Deadpool characterization, which has been one of my biggest struggles with his movies outside the suit. I genuinely can’t remember the last time he gave a truly effective dramatic, non-quippy performance outside of Mississippi Grind, but this works better because Troy isn’t the guy with all the answers. He’s the guy who needs someone with all the answers. Nikolai is that guy, and Branagh is so effortlessly charming and charismatic that the team-up element really works. Their chemistry carries a lot of the movie.
It also helps that there are a surprising number of jokes that actually land. The quasi-meet-cute between Troy and Nikolai, the Russian Government sending Alexander Volkov (played well by Marcin Dorociński) leading to Troy needing to hide in a vat of Russian moonshine leading to a really good sight gag, the two hiding out in a wine cellar alongside an escort while trying to avoid a Russian officer and his family, and eventually the climatic truck chase all provide genuinely funny bits. There’s a lot here that lands in what should, by all accounts, be another disposable straight-to-streaming action comedy.
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I can’t really believe it, but I thought this was really fun. It’s a bit long in the tooth, but Goldstein and Daley have delivered one of their better films, and Reynolds hasn’t been this likable in a while. It ends on a surprisingly gracious note about how we acknowledge, or frankly don’t, the people who serve our country.
If this was put in theaters, it’d be a real crowd-pleaser. A rare streaming movie that actually feels like it should’ve been put on the big screen before going to Apple TV+. A shame that it wasn’t.
Score: 7/10
Mayday (2026)
- Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Kenneth Branagh, Maria Bakalova, Marcin Dorociński, David Morse
- Director: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley
- Genre: Action, Adventure, Comedy
- Runtime: 110 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: September 3, 2026
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