It’s odd that we keep having to learn that other humans are people, too.
In fact, you could call it an indictment of humanity, or just of our age, that the premise of Mayday — a 1980s American serviceman slowly coming to terms with the idea that a Soviet soldier actually has a subjective inner life and thoughts other than consuming babies — works at all.
It’s presented as hard to accept that aging ex-KGB agent Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh) has non-dastardly intentions for rescuing U.S. navy pilot Troy (Ryan Reynolds) when he crashes near Nikolai’s cabin deep in U.S.S.R. territory. And when he escorts Troy through hails of Cold War gunfire and haymaker punches out of empathy and altruism, these qualities are framed, at least initially, as strange and alien — coming, as they do, from a Russian in 1987.
It’s also based on the assumption that a reasonable person wouldn’t believe Nikolai’s soft-hearted, America-loving reason for protecting the wounded Troy, who represents the country he’s come to love. Especially because he has his own estranged daughter (Maria Bakalova) to find and protect — not to mention they now have a rogue KGB agent (Marcin Dorociński) and his shadowy cabal of ruthless killers on their trail.
Are you really going to trust that it’s all because Nikolai just plain loves America and wants to defect, rather than it being an elaborate ruse to infiltrate and take down that shining city upon a hill from the inside.
WATCH | Mayday trailer:
It’s somewhat embarrassing, though not unexpected, that the rest of the film does play out as if to show salt-of-the-earth American Troy that foreigners can be just as genuine, complex and conscious as he is.
Mayday and other movies like it only work if we admit it makes implicit sense to not only hate anyone that’s different from you, but to assume that — at least at first — those people are barely people at all.
Which makes it all the more difficult to admit that Mayday actually does completely work.
It’s a shoot-em-up, odd-couple buddy comedy with more style than it has any excuse for, and features both actors in top form: Branagh as the charismatically kind death machine, and Reynolds as the straight-man foil who’s desperately trying to keep up and, generally, away from the carnage.
And importantly, there’s just enough of that carnage to match its comedy — and little enough of the latter to keep it from getting stale. Because positioning Reynolds as the wisecracking sidekick is always preferable to movies that situate his Deadpool-esque, wink-wink, nudge-nudge antics as the central selling point.
When those smarmy, self-satisfied asides come from the dead-inside side character in Adventureland, they play as both cute and revealing. But when The Adam Project decides to set a whole movie around snide sarcasm you quickly crash into the concept of diminishing returns.
Of course, it’s not the first time a director got the Reynolds balance right.
In truth, Mayday feels like a perfect mix between his 2015 tragicomic roadtrip comedy Mississippi Grind with sad-eyed Ben Mendelsohn, and his straight-shooting 2012 thriller Safe House alongside Denzel Washington as a similarly terrifying espionage everyman.
Mayday directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley tack to the same narrative wind; not only does Branagh fill an equally sage, temporizing role, but the camera does, too. For every knock-down, drag-out, bloody-knuckles bar brawl we witness, we’re also treated to mostly long, sustained cuts.
The camera glides through the mayhem as unbothered and assured as Nikolai himself, pirouetting almost lazily around a relaxed Branagh as he relieves a man of the burden of having a face without shattered pieces of vodka bottle inside it.
It’s an impressive showcase of “less is more” camerawork — almost the exact opposite of the frenetic back and forth now seen in even modern Oscar winning movies. Instead, this camerawork is similar to the “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” martial art technique that Nikolai himself uses to put people in the hospital.
But the end result is still mostly simple and surface; an Olympus Has Fallen type of movie for the Reagan years. And, as mentioned, the heartening theme at its core only works if the idea of “people in Russia are people, too” wasn’t so laughably self-evident that it feels offensive.
But it’s far from the first piece of pop culture to mine that moral. Not too long ago, Netflix’s Stranger Things doubled up on the trope, reflecting ’80s trends seen in everything from heartrending Moscow on the Hudson to brain-numbing Russkies.
When they work, it’s because they aim for a vicarious, dramatic-irony thrill — how silly it that people once thought that way — or when they’re aware of their status as propaganda.
And propaganda they are; you’d be hard pressed to find a mainstream Western film that shows both America and Russia without depicting one as inherently good with some flaws and the other as a festering hellhole with a few moral (though emotionally vacant) resistors as the exception.
This is not to say propaganda is bad filmmaking — far from it. Above and beyond its military, American cultural exports are their most effective weapon; one that has conquered more nations than anything else in their arsenal.
But they can also showcase a rageful, entitled jingoism — the type of singular chosen-one narrative that birthed the weirdly terrifying, righteous violence of Red Dawn. Or that position it as such a bastion of humanity and freedom, that even the Russians end up cheering for America in Rocky IV.
But if there’s one thing to be said for Mayday, it’s that it’s at least dimly aware of its role in that system — and America’s.
Throughout, there’s a back-and-forth between Nikolai and Troy on the respective propaganda they’ve been served. There are corrupt, ineffectual politicians on both sides abandoning their people. There are, of course, more egregious violations of rights perpetrated by the Soviets — but there isn’t a wholesale vilification of one, or wholesale vindication of the other.
In all, it’s a pretty low bar to clear. But it’s one that Mayday does lumber over, resulting in a mainstream American popcorn film that at least teases the question of whether there were clear cut good and bad guys in the Cold War.
It’s not much, but it’s enough to make one thing clear: The surprise isn’t discovering the humanity in the enemy, it’s that we think we’re removed from it at all.
