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.

The Donn of Tiki: Clever title, fascinating documentary

The Donn of Tiki (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); Unrated, but akin to PG, for occasional crime references

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

Ernest Gantt — possibly Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt — was the living embodiment of that classic line from 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:

 

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

 

Donn Beach died in June 1989, and therefore wasn't available for the filmmakers. They
did the next best thing, teaming with Mystery Meat Media to deliver Beach's portion
of a lengthy interview via this droll stop-motion puppet.

Gantt, much better known as Donn Beach, was the public face of the Don the Beachcomber bars and restaurants, which — during their heyday — had numerous locations throughout the United States. Along with Victor Jules Bergeron Jr., the public face of the similar Trader Vic’s chain, they revolutionized the tiki bar scene. That became quite a thing from the late 1930s to the early 1970s ... at which point, interest waned, until reviving and becoming even more popular as the 21st century has progressed.

But Gantt definitely was the first to turn a blend of Cantonese food, Caribbean mixology and South Pacific décor, into a popular destination. He invented both the craft cocktail and the concept of “themed escapism” later mimicked (often not as tastefully) by chains such as Elephant Bar, Rainforest Café, Hard Rock Café and Chuck E. Cheese

 

But unlike Bergeron, a savvy businessman who led a fairly routine life, Gantt was a man of mystery who constantly embellished his past and accomplishments, to the point that it’s now extremely difficult to separate fact from fabrication.

 

Documentarians Alex Lamb and Max Well certainly had a lot of fun trying, and their delightful film works hard to establish ... if not actual truth, then near-truth. They do so with an engaging blend of archival footage; interviews with Gantt’s friends and family members; contemporary historians and mixologists; and even charming, 1930s-style black-and-white and color cartoon sequences (by Venturia Animation).

 

The most ingenious touch, though, is the stop-motion puppet figure of Gantt, animated by Mystery Meat Media, employed as the “face” during a lengthy radio interview the man gave back in 1986 ... a conversation which, it must be acknowledged, frequently muddies the waters of accuracy.

 

Lamb and Well also rely extensively on input from Tim “Swanky” Glazner, author of Searching for Don the Beachcomber, whose exhaustive research comes closest to nailing down the truth. But even he confesses, at times, that certain details of Gantt’s life remain obstruse. 

 

Actually, it’s amusing to hear different versions of the same story, such as how — and precisely when — the Zombie cocktail was concocted.

Coyote Vs. ACME: A smash riot

Coyote Vs. ACME (2025) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five); rated PG, for cartoon violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.6.26

Chuck Jones would be thrilled to bits.

 

When he and writer Michael Maltese co-created the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, for the 1949 Warner Bros. cartoon short “Fast and Furry-ous,” they likely thought this pairing would be a one-off.

 

Paige (Lana Condor) and her Uncle Kevin (Will Forte) are about the experience the
chaos that results from even a seemingly innocuous ACME product ... and they'd also
better be careful with what's inside that box.

As if.

That ingenious tribute to the silent-movie slapstick efforts of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd became — at the risk of citing the infamous oxymoron — an instant classic. 

 

Jones went on to direct 25 more theatrical shorts featuring the doomed efforts of Carnivorous Vulgaris (the Coyote) to catch Accelleratii Incredibus (the Road Runner), up to 1980’s “Soup or Sonic.” While the first dozen or so arguably are funnier and more clever than what followed, as a whole it’s still an awesome body of work.

 

I’m therefore delighted to report that director Dave Green and his team of writers — Samy Burch, James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, inspired by Ian Frazer’s hilariously deadpan 1990 humor piece in The New Yorker — have faithfully adhered to Jones’ wit, style and frenetic comedy pacing with this phantastic feature film.

 

Full disclosure: What follows is an unapologetic and shamelessly biased five-star review by someone who has, from the moment I was old enough to appreciate his work, long worshipped at the altar of All Things Chuck Jones ... and I now have no trouble adding this marvelously chaotic blend of live action and animation to that pantheon of cartoon comedy.

 

The premise here is as golden as it is simple. After the film opens on Wile E.’s most recent attempts to catch his prey — each failing, due (as always) to faulty engineering — the Coyote finally realizes that the blame, all these years, is not his. No, he has been the victim of dangerously defective ACME products.

 

The obvious solution: a product liability lawsuit.

 

But something even more sinister is afoot here. A prologue reveals that longtime ACME scientist Dr. Lorre — an intentional caricature of Peter Lorre, one of numerous movie stars lampooned in early Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies shorts — has become convinced that the work he has been doing, on the clandestine “Project Sisyphus,” is unacceptably dangerous. He manages to box up one mysterious item before being caught and — true to ACME form — forced to step into a small circular black hole. He vanishes, after which the hole is carefully rolled up and placed in storage (!).

The Whisper Man: No reason to eavesdrop

The Whisper Man (2026) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five); rated R, for bloody violence, disturbing images, profanity and suicide

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang 

Director James Ashcroft gets points for maintaining a consistently creepy atmosphere of unsettling dread, but that can’t compensate for a storyline that relies too heavily on coincidence, contrivance and just plain stupid behavior by the primary characters.

 

Tom (Adam Scott) and his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) initially are optimistic
about their move to a new community ... but they'll soon have second thoughts,
starting with the quietly malevolent house in which they've chosen to live.

Scripters Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer have taken considerable liberty with their uneven adaptation of British crime author Steve Mosby’s 2019 debut novel (written under the pseudonym Alex North). For starters, the setting has been moved to the fictitious woodsy community of Garretton, New Jersey, still reeling from a series of grisly child abductions and murders committed two decades earlier by a figure known as the “Whisper Man.”

All these years later, children still frighten each other by chanting a macabre poem generated by those tragedies:

 

If your window’s left unlatched,

You’ll hear him tapping at the glass.

 

Disturbingly — as the film begins — a young boy, Neil Spencer, has just gone missing. The search team is led by local police Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), and the group discovers a body ... but this one is years decomposed.

 

Elsewhere, Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) and his 8-year-old son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto), have just driven to Garretton, hoping for a fresh start following the tragic loss of Tom’s wife, and the boy’s mother. Depending on the camera angle, looking through the front windshield, there either is — or isn’t — somebody sitting in the back seat behind Tom.

 

As we soon learn, this is Jake’s special imaginary friend.

 

“Your mom always wanted us to move back to the town we grew up in,” Tom says. His relationship with Jake is loving, but strained; Tom can see that his son still is damaged goods, and he tries hard to compensate. Jake, in turn, carries his “packet of special things” wherever he goes.

 

So, okay; moving to Garretton is prompted by a valid reason ... but why did Tom pick this particular house in which to live? It’s a massive, ominous three-story affair, large enough for a family of eight, laden with huge, empty rooms that exude a palpable level of dread: completely impractical for just two people.

 

(As it eventually transpires, this house is a poor choice for several unpleasant reasons: merely the first of this dumb script’s numerous contrivances.)

 

So, they settle in. Jake begins school; Tom, a novelist, hopes this environment will help overcome a serious case of writer’s block.

 

A brief cutaway reveals poor Neil (Exavier Montanez) locked in a tiny room, being terrorized by a deranged hooded sicko, whose whispered platitudes are wholly at odds with his eventual intentions.

The Christophers: A work of art

The Christophers (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); rated R, for profanity

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.30.26

Once upon a time, this thoughtful character study would have arrived with a visible splash, and enjoyed a modest but well-deserved run at arthouse theaters.

 

Instead, it landed directly in streaming purgatory, likely never to be found by the potential audience that mainstream release would have attracted.

 

Understandably suspicious about the actual reasons for her having entered his life,
Julian (Ian McKellen) tantalizes Lori (Michaela Coel) by showing her where he has 
stashed a long-unfinished series of paintings.

More’s the pity, because considerable talent is on display here.

Ed Solomon’s intriguing original script is essentially a two-hander that would have made a crackling stage play. Director Steven Soderbergh opens up the tableau a bit, granting us a sense of London’s bohemian Fitzrovia district, but our attention is held throughout by the enthralling performances from stars Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel.

 

McKellen effortlessly slides into the role of waspish, once-famous painter Julian Sklar, his glory years long behind him, all but forgotten and holed up in a pair of adjacent townhouses connected via their basements. (A droll running gag: Whenever anybody rings one buzzer, the intercom invariably responds with a testy “Other door!”)

 

Julian is best known to the current generation for his long run as the dismissive star of a cruel, long-running TV show, “Art Fight,” during which would-be artists submitted works live, on camera, hoping for praise and promise. More often than not, Julian instead delighted in cruel jokes and humiliating take-downs.

 

“A cry for help from the paint itself!” is just one example of his scornful assessments. 

 

TV viewers apparently ate it up. (And they would, right? One can but shudder.)

 

Coel plays Lori Butler, an impressively educated art critic familiar with that world in general, painting and painters in particular, and — most pointedly — Sklar, who has been the focus of her withering published commentary for quite some time. She seems to have taken particular delight in detailing his progressive decline.

 

She’s also a part-time forger, which bespeaks considerable talent of her own.

 

We meet Lori first, when she’s approached by Sklar’s children, Barnaby and Sallie (James Corden and Jessica Gunning). The latter knows Lori from their days in art college, and somehow also is aware of her clandestine activities. They want Lori to take a job as Julian’s assistant, so that she’ll have access to a series of unfinished, long-abandoned canvases ... in order to complete them, so that Barnaby and Sallie will have a substantial inheritance when their father dies.

 

The canvases in question are the long-rumored third “Christopher Series,” which — if “suddenly” discovered stashed in Sklar’s townhouse, following his death — would be worth a fortune.

 

With just a few deft strokes, via dialogue and body language, Corden and Gunning establish Barnaby and Sallie as venal, grasping and thoroughly despicable clods.

Normal Far from it (in a deliciously ghastly way)

Normal (2025) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for profanity and relentless strong, bloody violence

Available via: HBO MAX and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

Paul Newman went through a period, for several years following 1961’s The Hustler, when superstition apparently prompted him to insist that several subsequent anti-hero single-word films begin with the letter “H,” in some cases prompting script character name changes: Hud, Harper and Hombre.

 

Confronted by unexpectedly overwhelming odds, Keith (Brendan Fletcher, left) Sheriff
Ulysses (Bob Odenkirk) and Lori (Reena Jolly) become unusual allies.

Bob Odenkirk seems to be doing the same with his second-career emergence as a “regular, down-home guy turned reluctant avenger,” first in Nobody, and now in this one. One wonders what’ll be next ... Nowhere? Nevermore? Naturally?

(Okay, in fairness, his family guy in Nobody and its sequel wasn’t that ordinary. But still...)

 

Odenkirk stars as Ulysses (no last name given), hired as a temporary substitute sheriff in the quaint little township of Normal, Minnesota. It’s a sleepy community, looking very much like a throwback to 1950s Americana, with an entryway city sign that reads “We like it here.”

 

Ulysses has greeted this temporary assignment as a welcome respite from both marital woes and severe moral trauma suffered during the line of duty. He’s scheduled to be in Normal for just eight weeks, as an emergency stand-in for former Sheriff Gunderston (Pat Harris), who died unexpectedly ... under, as Ulysses soon discovers, rather unusual circumstances.

 

But that isn’t his problem. As he and Deputy Mike Nelson (Billy MacLellan) cruise Normal’s downtown streets, Ulysses expresses his desire — via voice-over, and (later) unanswered phone calls to his estranged wife, Penny — to leave the town exactly as he found it. He views himself as a “midwife with a gun,” merely helping a transition.

 

He meets glad-handing Mayor Kibner (Henry Winkler); local doctor/coroner Walter Vilie (David Lawrence Brown); yarn and craft shop owner Mary Beth (Megan MacArton); hardware store owner Maynard (Carson Nattrass); bar owner Moira (Lena Headey, still well remembered as Cersei Lannister, on Game of Thrones); cheerful sheriff’s office receptionist Sally Johnson (Lauren Cochrane); and co-Deputy Blaine Anderson (Ryan Allen), who eagerly anticipates being elected permanent sheriff.

 

Everybody treats Ulysses kindly, but with an odd touch of amusement or even condescension.

 

But this isn’t actually where the film begins. A brief prologue, set in Osaka, introduces a powerful and vicious Yakuza boss (Takahiro Inoue, as The Oyabun) who — during an early sign of the carnage to come — enforces a rather grisly ritual to determine which of his men will be dispatched for “a job” in Minnesota. 

 

(Guess where.)

Mutiny: Plenty of shipboard action

Mutiny (2026) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for considerable profanity and strong, bloody violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.23.26

Jason Statham’s action thrillers usually follow a predictable, cookie-cutter series of plot beats:

 

• His character is a seasoned, hardened, stoic, impressively capable and highly decorated former cop/military officer equally adept with weapons and hand-to-hand combat, with a Tragic Memory in his past;

 

Moving cautiously through the innards of the cargo ship Artemis, Cole (Jason Statham)
and Angie (Annabelle Wallis) search for a first aid kit, which will allow him to attend to
her wounded shoulder.

• He has re-entered civilian life in either an isolated, quieter or conventional manner, usually befriending somebody along the way, but said person...

 • ... gets killed, for some nefarious reason, prompting a won’t-ever-stop vow of vengeance.

 

Lather, rinse, repeat. But why change? It always works...

 

This new entry in Statham’s oeuvre comes from scripters J.P. Davis and Lindsay Michel, who creatively dump Statham’s Cole Reed into an intriguing scenario during the bulk of the action.

 

I’m less impressed by director Jean-François Richet, who opens the film with a pointless flash-forward — what, he worried about gaining our attention? — and subsequently favors too many dizzy overhead drone shots and tight-tight-tight close-ups of Statham and the other actors. All are hallmarks of lazy, uninspired directing.

 

The flash-forward aside, events begin quietly, with Reed — a former Marine commando and London SCO19 Specialist Firearm police officer — five years into a happy position as security chief for his close friend and mentor, billionaire Thai shipping tycoon Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram). The feeling is mutual: Tibu regards Cole as family, and they enjoy playing chess together.

 

After a long and successful career, Tibu has decided to retire. He clearly regrets abandoning the empire that took a lifetime to build, particularly since his son, Kameron (Chaneil Kular), has no interest in the business. At the posh retirement party, Cole notices a dapper but somehow sinister figure (Arnas Fedaravicious) hovering in the background; their eyes briefly lock, and then the unnamed guest moves on.

 

Later, while driving Tibu home, their car is ambushed. Cole kills all the attackers, but not before Tibu is mortally wounded. Knowing he has very little time, Cole scoops up the killers’ IDs and flees. The sinister figure, with numerous bent Thai cops in his pocket, arranges for Cole to be tagged as Tibu’s killer; this version of events is blasted through all media outlets, and an arrest warrant is issued.

 

Cole notices that the killers crewed on the container ship Artemis; by fortunate coincidence, he resembles one of them. Using that man’s ID, he’s able to pass through Customs and board the ship, determined to figure out What The Heck Is Going On.