Mayday (2019)

(On Cable TV, August 2021) It takes maybe thirty seconds to understand that Mayday is a cheap, cheap film made on a tiny budget with subpar talent. There’s something immediately off-putting in the static camera movements, indifferent acting, tasteless writing and substandard production values. The only thing that helps is the mystery, once it gets started almost fifteen minutes in. We’re in a plane going from Los Angeles to London, and suddenly passengers vanish into thin air. What could possibly be the cause of this is the question that preoccupies our protagonist, an air marshal rather decently played by Michael Pare. If you’re intrigued, good, because that’s pretty much all that Mayday has going for it, especially as it develops its plot into something increasingly unsatisfying. Helped by a mysterious brunette who never seems to lose her cool (perhaps because she’s not a good actress, perhaps because of Botox), our protagonist discovers a mysterious magic tome. (It’s in old languages, but air marshal training apparently prepared him to read it.)  Then the plot leaps off the deep end in presenting an out-of-control demon taking people away (where?) for… reasons. The internal mythology presented in the film isn’t even consistent on at least two levels, and a dismayingly down-to-earth ending makes a mockery of whatever came before it. But don’t worry, because Mayday sabotages itself well before the underwhelming ending and its unconvincing CGI: it’s badly plotted, dumbly conceived and ineptly executed. The dialogue is terrible, the characters don’t have consistent motivations and it’s so badly handled that any working hypothesis viewers may have regarding what’s going on is guaranteed to be better than what actually happens later in the film. I still can’t quite square the purpose of it all, or the role played by the brunette character. There are tons of missed opportunities left on the table, and it’s a good thing that Pare is an old hand at saving bargain-bin movies like these because he’s often the least objectionable thing on-screen. Mayday does have a bit of that bad-movie ridiculousness about it — it’s terrible in a mildly entertaining way (wait until you get a longer glimpse at the demon!), and you can see opportunities that a better film would have taken. I’m not necessarily against this kind of low-budget thriller at all: I can recall a few other films using the confines of an airplane as an effective way to make good use of a tiny budget. But Mayday simply fumbles the elements at its disposal, or simply doesn’t want to do the work to get to the next level up.