Oscar-Winning Legend Humiliates Himself With Ryan Reynolds

Apple TV Mayday (September 4, Apple TV) is so unintentionally—if, given its title, aptly—distressing that it’s difficult to pinpoint its worst element.

Is it the fact that this odd-couple action-comedy features main characters who aren’t actually at odds? Is it its absurd and off-putting Cold War politics, which posit the U.S. as not as great as it thinks it is and the Soviet Union as better than it was portrayed stateside? Or is it the fact that one of our great Shakespearean actors has stooped to Ryan Reynolds’ unfortunate level? The answer is that it’s all of the above, as Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s follow-up to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is, from every perceivable angle, misbegotten.

Without a single witty moment to alleviate its perfunctory (albeit well-staged) centerpieces, and boasting a story rife with laughable USA-USSR equivocations, it’s a mirthless mess whose ideas about 1980s international relations are almost as lousy as the incessant one-liners spouted by Reynolds, who reconfirms that, outside of the Deadpool franchise, his sarcastic schtick only works in small doses.

Troy Kelly (Reynolds) is introduced in 1987 bantering about Cabbage Patch Kids dolls (“If I saw a baby like that, I’d never stop screaming”) as he shows off his peerless talent as a Navy pilot.

On the ground, he cares for his ailing dad Harold (David Morse) and tells his comrades, on their night out, that communism “flies in the face of human nature.” He’s a rah-rah patriot of the cockiest order.

Thus, he’s the perfect candidate for a top-secret mission to infiltrate Soviet airspace and take photographs of under-construction missile silos.

As it turns out, Troy isn’t flying his spy plane; he’s just along for the ride.

And when the craft is shot down, he plummets into a snowy Russian forest.

Fortuitously, he’s found and nursed back to health by Nikolai “Nick” Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), a bushy-bearded recluse in a flannel shirt and snow pants who resides in a cabin decorated with all sorts of Americana, from postcards of Mount Rushmore to a poster of his favorite movie, Top Gun , which he’s able to watch courtesy of a bootleg VHS tape.

Troy is understandably wary of this stranger, who has him tied up to a bed.

However, he soon learns that Nick is a former KGB officer who now pines to visit the home of the free and the brave, where he might indulge in the culinary wonders of McDonald’s.

Despite Nick being an obvious, and miraculous, savior who’s fundamentally on his side, Troy treats his benefactor with the sort of hostility typical of big-screen buddy comedies.