Mayday: new Netflix spy-fy comedy movie (trailer).

Apple TV has released the first trailer for Mayday, a Cold War action comedy in which Ryan Reynolds crash-lands inside the Soviet Union and discovers that Kenneth Branagh has been waiting for him.

There are worse fates, although most of them also involve Kenneth Branagh adopting an accent.

Reynolds plays Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly, a hotshot US Navy pilot sent on a top-secret mission into Russian territory during the 1980s. The operation promptly collapses, leaving Kelly stranded behind enemy lines without transport, diplomatic protection or any obvious means of explaining why an American military aircraft has landed in somebody else’s superpower.

His nickname is Assassin, which suggests the Navy may have been overcompensating. No competent assassin should be introduced to the enemy by the remains of his aeroplane.

Kelly is discovered by Nikolai Ustinov, a former KGB agent played by Branagh. Nikolai is gruff, suspicious and fascinated by American popular culture, making him the Soviet equivalent of somebody who loudly despises France while owning three berets and a cellar full of Burgundy.

At first, Troy assumes he has been captured. This is understandable, since Nikolai holds him at gunpoint and behaves with the unsettling hospitality of a man who has prepared both dinner and an interrogation room.

The trailer suggests, however, that Nikolai is less interested in turning Troy over to the authorities than in acquiring his own personal American. He appears delighted by his visitor, rather as a provincial collector might react after finding an authentic Californian lodged in the garden shed.

What follows is an escape story, a spy thriller and an odd-couple comedy conducted beneath the collapsing wallpaper of the late Cold War. Troy wants to get home. Nikolai seems interested in helping him, although his methods include captivity, threats and the sort of friendship that begins with one participant tied to a chair.

Ryan Reynolds has spent much of his career perfecting the role of the handsome man who survives danger by speaking faster than everybody trying to kill him. Here, that talent has finally become a formal military strategy.

His Troy Kelly is introduced as a swaggering pilot with the confidence of a man who believes aircraft regulations were written for slower people. Once grounded, he discovers that charm is less effective when nobody accepts his currency and every passing vehicle may contain the Soviet security apparatus.

Branagh, meanwhile, seems to be enjoying himself enormously as Nikolai. His ex-KGB operative possesses the battered geniality of a retired bear who has discovered television advertising. He admires America from a safe ideological distance, collecting its records, expressions and possibly breakfast cereals while remaining heavily armed in case capitalism arrives without an appointment.

The trailer is accompanied by Neil Diamond’s “America”, an admirably unsubtle musical choice. Nothing says covert infiltration quite like a chorus announcing the destination to everyone within radar range.

The song also allows the film to contrast Troy’s heroic self-image with the embarrassing reality of his predicament. He may represent the free world, naval aviation and the full confidence of the United States government, but he is still stuck in the snow while a Russian stranger discusses his cultural preferences.

Behind the comedy sits a familiar piece of Cold War machinery. One man has been raised to see the other as an enemy. Both governments have built vast bureaucracies devoted to ensuring that they never meet except through rifle sights, propaganda broadcasts or the occasional carefully arranged prisoner exchange.

Naturally, once left alone together, they discover that international relations might have been considerably simpler had diplomats tried snacks and popular music before commissioning thousands of nuclear warheads.

This does not mean Mayday is threatening to become a seminar on détente. The trailer contains gunfire, aircraft, explosions, pursuit through frozen landscapes and several moments in which Ryan Reynolds appears to regret not remaining inside the wreckage.

The premise sits somewhere between Top Gun, The Defiant Ones and a particularly tense episode of Come Dine with Me. Troy and Nikolai must depend upon one another despite differing loyalties, incompatible temperaments and the persistent possibility that one of them has misunderstood the nature of the arrangement.

The film comes from John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the writing-directing team behind Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves. That is encouraging company. Both films understood that an action comedy works better when the jokes emerge from capable people improvising badly under pressure, rather than everyone pausing beside an explosion to deliver something polished by twelve screenwriters.

Game Night turned suburban competitiveness into a criminal conspiracy, while Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves managed the rare feat of making fantasy adventurers funny without treating the fantasy itself as ridiculous. Mayday appears to apply the same principle to espionage. The Cold War remains dangerous, but the men trapped inside it are allowed to notice how peculiar it all is.

Maria Bakalova joins the cast as Anna Ustinov, alongside Marcin Dorociński as Alexander Volkov and David Morse as Harold Kelly. Their precise positions within the international tangle are being kept under suitable levels of classification, although experience suggests anyone named Volkov in a Cold War thriller should not be entrusted with the passports.

The setting also offers Reynolds a slight variation on his usual screen persona. Troy may still have the quick remarks, but he is operating in a world where sarcasm cannot summon superheroes, regenerate bullet wounds or persuade a streaming service to purchase a Welsh football club.

Nikolai may therefore prove the more dangerous comic presence. Branagh has the theatrical authority to make complete nonsense sound like classified doctrine. Give him a Russian accent, a firearm and an affection for American records, and even the furniture may begin confessing.

There is something pleasingly old-fashioned about the whole enterprise. The fate of the world may be involved, but there are no satellites capable of reading a man’s thoughts, no artificial intelligence plotting inside a wristwatch and no villain attempting to upload consciousness into the cloud.

Instead, survival depends upon unreliable machinery, paper maps, border guards and whether two men who have been trained to distrust each other can endure the same journey without becoming a diplomatic incident.

It is spy-fi with the technology turned down and the personality defects turned up.

The title Mayday refers to the international distress call, although it may also describe the reaction inside US intelligence headquarters when somebody realises their missing pilot has befriended an ex-KGB enthusiast with a Neil Diamond collection.

The trailer promises a film about enemies becoming allies, but it also understands an essential truth about buddy movies: friendship is funnier when neither party has formally agreed to it.

Nikolai appears to have decided that Troy is his companion. Troy appears to have decided that Nikolai is his only available route home. Between those positions lies enough emotional misunderstanding to sustain several border crossings and at least one large explosion.

Here at SFcrowsnest, we have always maintained that international peace would be easier if rival intelligence officers were forced to share a small vehicle for several days. By the end, they would either resolve their differences or agree to destroy the vehicle, which is still progress of a sort.

Mayday looks less interested in reinventing the spy thriller than in shaking it until the concealed jokes fall out. Reynolds supplies the American confidence, Branagh provides Soviet eccentricity and the Iron Curtain becomes one extremely inconvenient departure lounge.

Whether Troy escapes Russia is not revealed. Whether Kenneth Branagh escapes with the film seems considerably less doubtful.

Mayday premieres globally on Apple TV on 4th September 2026.