Mayday: Easygoing Cold War thrills

Mayday (2026) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five); rated PG-13, for violence, action and fleeting profanity

Available via: Apple TV+

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.13.26

This film’s lighthearted, mismatched-buddies-in-peril tone notwithstanding, co-directors and writers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein deserve credit for inserting a strong message relevant to our times:

 

Don’t let government propaganda and assumptions about “the other” interfere with our individual ability to judge people based on their character and behavior.

 

Evading KGB pursuers was hard enough when Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh, center) had
only his new friend Troy (Ryan Reynolds) to worry about .... but matters get even more
intense when Nikolai's daughter (Maria Bakalova) enters the picture.

The year is 1987, toward the end of the U.S./Soviet Cold War. Despite U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s initial belief that the Soviets were dangerous and immoral, his tone has softened following Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985. Even so, U.S. military forces remain on constant alert for signs of nuclear build-up.

Following a training drill during which U.S. Navy fighter pilot Lt. Troy Kelly (Ryan Reynolds) demonstrates “the right stuff” during the unconventional rescue of a wingman, he’s selected for a special reconnaissance op. The CIA-sponsored mission: to surveille suspected missile silos 1,200 miles inside the Soviet border.

 

To Kelly’s unhappy surprise, he’s relegated to co-pilot status, responsible solely for running the camera. Their long-range, high-altitude SR-71 Blackbird instead will be flown by Air Force pilot Maj. Pete Sanders (Louis Cancelmi, appropriately condescending), an insufferable jerk with the typical Air Force bias against Navy pilots.

 

Sanders pays for that hubris in the worst possible way, when they’re intercepted by a Soviet MiG. The quick-thinking Kelly manages to destroy the MiG — quite improbably, which signals the tone this film will take — and eject. But debris destroys his parachute as snow-covered terra firma appears below, and his final fall results in a bad leg injury. His last conscious image is of an approaching cloaked figure, carrying a nasty-looking rifle...

 

...who, when Kelly regains consciousness, turns out to be benevolent Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a former KGB officer turned passionate admirer of American culture in general, and his bootlegged VHS copy of the movie “Top Gun” in particular.

Anthropoid: Grim, fact-based war drama

Anthropoid (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Terrible title, taut thriller.

And historical authenticity doesn’t necessarily justify the choice. Nor does historical authenticity conceal another issue.

Having parachuted into Czechoslovakia only the night before, Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan,
left) and Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) steal a truck in order to reach Prague, where they are to
link up with resistance fighters

To cite another recent example ... despite the care with which 2000’s The Perfect Storm was assembled, I couldn’t overcome the core paradox:

Sebastian Junger’s book — and, thus, William D. Wittliff’s screenplay — were based on an actual event that left no survivors. Ergo, everything we watched was no more than an educated presumption of what actually happened: a narrative conceit that can’t help pulling us out of the story at every significant juncture.

This is never a problem with dramatic fiction, which allows us to simply go with the flow; we accept the saga on its own merits. But no matter how persuasively George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg delivered their dialogue — no matter how heroically they behaved — it was impossible to accept things at face value. Were the men in question really that brave? Actually that selfless?

Similar questions emerge during the course of Anthropoid, director Sean Ellis’ often gripping account of a World War II incident that forever changed the fate of Czechoslovakia, and quite likely altered the direction of the entire war. Ellis and co-writer Anthony Frewin have developed their script from what is known about “Operation Anthropoid,” and while the clandestine mission’s preparation and outcome are the stuff of recorded history, much of this storyline can’t be any better than speculation.

Whether that’s vexing enough to be an issue, will be up to the individual viewer. It’s easy to imagine that things may have gone down this way, and that might be sufficient. Ellis certainly draws persuasive performances from most of his cast — with one unfortunate exception — and there’s no denying the suspenseful nobility inherent in WWII resistance fighters who risked everything to thwart Nazi advances.

The film begins in December 1941, three years after the Allies’ notorious “Munich Agreement”: the act of appeasement that passively allowed Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia without a shot being fired. Two soldiers from the London-based Czechoslovakian army-in-exile — Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) and Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) — parachute back into their occupied homeland, and carefully make their way to the few individuals who remain in the underground resistance.