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Acting is work, but Kenneth Branagh and Ryan Reynolds appear to be having an absolute blast in Apple TV’s new film “Mayday.” And their enthusiasm is instantly infectious.
Though it arrives in the dog days and is set, for large portions, in Siberia and its environs, “Mayday” is pure summer: a classic comedy-adventure buddy film that offers misty-eyed homage to the original “Top Gun” and an equally sentimental pro-glasnost, hands-across-the-water subtext while delivering as much witty dialogue and miraculous escapes as a mercifully under-two-hour movie can hold.
Troy Brennan (Reynolds) is a Navy fighter pilot (code name: Assassin) who can, without breaking a sweat, anchor the film firmly in 1987 by ranting about Cabbage Patch dolls before saving a flight exercise from disaster with a cocky and brilliant maneuver.
Not surprisingly, he is plucked for a covert mission that involves photographing secret Soviet bases from a tricked-out stealth jet. Alas, like the Titanic, it is apparently not as tricked out or as stealthy as advertised. Troy has barely snapped a pic before he is forced to parachute into the Siberian wilderness. He awakes to find himself bound to a bed in the cabin of Nikolai Ustinov (Branagh), a Russian Grizzly Adams (a period-appropriate character that is absolutely name-checked) who says to call him Nick.
Nick too is a lover of “Top Gun” and all things American. “I am your biggest fan,” he tells Troy, who may be three years away from watching “Misery” (which served as early inspiration for “Mayday”), but is understandably suspicious given the circumstances, especially when Nick explains that the ropes were necessary to keep Troy still while performing “surgery.”
But it’s true and Nick’s delight in tending to his own personal Maverick is sincere. With the Finnish border, and any hope of safety, more than a thousand miles away, he wants to keep Troy away from Red Army forces that are undoubtedly searching for him. Still when he suggests that Troy simply “wait out the Cold War” with him, the pilot decides it’s time to go.
‘The Whisper Man’ is a jump-scare thriller haunted by many things, including the ineffable ties between parent and child.
The ensuing tense but hilarious fight sequences reveal that this kindly hermit has a serious, military-trained past — in the KGB, as it turns out, though he walked away when the horrors of his job threatened to define him. Now Nick dreams of eating McDonald’s and traveling America by camper van.
Back in Moscow, Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), the anti-Gorbachev head of state security, is indeed looking for the downed American pilot in the hopes that his capture, and proof of his mission, will derail any notion of peace between the Soviet Union and the United States.
His efforts force Nick and Troy on an excellent ‘80s-hits-fueled adventure in search of a way to communicate with the American Embassy in Moscow.
Exit left, pursued by, in Cold War terms, the Bear.
Writers-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein may not have created Troy specifically for Reynolds (who also serves as executive producer), but it certainly feels like they did. As Troy, his signature wide-eyed, guileless delivery of sarcasm is a first line of defense that softens as his understanding of the Russian people, including his companion, grows. Branagh is just as perfectly cast. As his extraordinarily varied career proves, the man can do pretty much anything and “anything” now includes making a shaggy, Bruce Springsteen-loving Siberian hermit with super-soldier abilities both a source of constant comedy and humanity.
Even with a bushy beard, Branagh’s face offers a window to Nick’s life of regrets and his sudden wild hope.
