An action comedy which passes the time, by far and away the highlight of Mayday is Kenneth Branagh’s very witty turn as a Top Gun-loving former KGB agent who tries to help American pilot Ryan Reynolds get out of Russia after he crashes his spy plane. It used to be that when I wrote about soundtrack albums I generally had a good idea of what the composer was trying to do with his score, whether I liked it or not (and whether I’d seen the film or not), but that’s becoming ever-more-infrequently the case, and Mayday is a very puzzling one. The film attempts to play things for laughs, it features big and bold and deliberately over-the-top use of some classic 80s power songs – and then in between those songs comes Colin Stetson’s score, which is – well, it’s really hard to know what the thinking was.
It’s very dark and oppressive, not acknowledging the film’s attempts at being funny – which could be a perfectly valid approach – but there’s absolutely no attempt to bring any lightness of tone. It’s more like what you might expect the music about someone being tortured to death for two hours to sound like than a light-hearted action comedy. It has a retro, 80s synth vibe – which makes perfect sense – but does not in any way attempt to evoke the sound of Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun score – which does not make any sense. You can even hear some Faltermeyer in the movie at one point – now a Top Gun pastiche, I could have understood. There’s absolutely no melody though – it’s industrial noises for forty minutes. It’s so intent on being not just miserable but actively irritating (and there’s no doubt it achieves both of those things), I honestly couldn’t begin to imagine what the thinking behind it was as a film score, and as an album it is similarly difficult to picture who the audience may be. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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