Okay so I finally caught Mayday, and straight up, it's the most fun I've had with an action movie in a minute. It hits Apple TV+ September 4, so mark it, because if you grew up on a steady diet of '80s action like I didn't (I'm 22, I inherited the obsession through osmosis, mostly via my grandma's VHS collection) this thing still works. It works because it knows exactly what it's borrowing from.

The UPI review calls it a celebration of '80s action with modern filmmaking, and that's pretty much the perfect description. Think big set pieces, guys jumping off things, a hero who takes a beating and keeps going... but shot with cameras and editing that actually let you see what's happening. No shaky-cam soup. You can follow the fights. Revolutionary concept, I know.

Ryan Reynolds is the whole show here. And okay, I get it, some people are tired of the Reynolds schtick, the smirk, the quips. I've heard the complaints. But Mayday uses it differently. The '80s heroes were invincible meat sculptures who never doubted themselves for a second. Reynolds plays a guy who quips because he's terrified, and the movie lets the mask slip sometimes. When he goes quiet, it hits harder, because you know how much noise he was making before. I think that's when he's at his best. The movie knows it too.

What surprised me is how much the attitude shift actually matters. Old action movies were kind of... mean? Like casual-mean, in ways we didn't clock back then. Mayday keeps the scale and the spectacle but the heroism feels earned instead of entitled. The side characters get to be people instead of punchlines. Same DNA with the toxic stuff edited out, and turns out the fun part was never the toxic stuff. Wild how that works.

I keep saying Apple TV+ has the best quality-per-title ratio of any streamer and movies like this are exactly why. They're not pumping out forty things a month hoping two stick. They made one big loud action movie and made it well. There's a set piece about halfway through that I refuse to spoil but I audibly said "oh no" at my TV and then immediately rewound it. that's all you're getting from me.

Is it going to reinvent the genre? No. Does it want to? Also no. It wants to be the movie you put on Friday night that ends with you going "that ruled," and it succeeds. My one complaint is the middle sags a little, like a stretch of plot it didn't need. Trim that and this is an easy rewatch forever movie.

Dante's going to love this one, by the way. It's well under three hours, so he'll consider it a short film, but the craft is there and he respects craft. Watch it before he texts me a paragraph about it. He will. He always does.