Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh star in this goofy but entertaining action-comedy bromance set in the cold war 80s, when it seemed every red-blooded young guy in America adored Top Gun and wanted to be a US Navy fighter pilot. It’s got some outrageous close-quarter fight scenes – and who knew Branagh could bust out martial arts moves? Is he going to follow Bob Odenkirk into an unexpected action movie career? The final sequences of automotive mayhem in and around Moscow might remind you of the heady days of Roger Moore as James Bond.
Reynolds is Troy Kelly (callsign “Assassin”), a supercool fighter pilot in 1987, who is always doing brave and brilliant stuff that isn’t in the rulebook, and cracking wise in the accepted Reynolds manner. But when his spy plane is shot down deep inside snowy and forested Soviet territory, Troy awakens from his coma to find himself in the log cabin of retired KGB man Nikolai Ustinov, cheerfully played by Branagh, who is a secret fan of all things American and obsessively rewatches Top Gun on samizdat VHS. He suggests to the stunned Troy that he simply stays in his cabin, watching the film with him, until the cold war is over.
