Mayday is a 2019 thriller about a flight from Los Angeles to London where frequent power outages lead to passengers mysteriously disappearing one by one.
Boarding a routine flight from LA to London, flight attendants Lynn (Chanel Ryan) and Aeryn (Sadie Katz) welcome a string of passengers onto first class, including newlyweds Mark (Christopher Drummond) and Penny Tillman (Elise Muller), a doctor (Raj Kala), a sleazy music producer named Smokey (Scott Engrotti), and a curious fellow (Michael Wainwright) aggressively clinging to his briefcase. Amid them is also sky marshall Adam Anderson (Michael Paré), who finds himself at the heart of strange mystery when a power outage has a passenger disappear when the lights flicker on and off. Then another. And then one of the pilots. It’s a nightmare at 30,000 feet.
It’s a fairly good idea for movie plot, the tight confines of a small passenger airline offering the perfect setting for some claustrophobic mayhem. Imagine if people started suddenly vanishing right in front of you, no trace, gone, vamoose. Scary stuff. Potentially. What happens here though, not so much. You might remember Jodie Foster‘s Flightplan, which handled this idea in a more plausible manner, but director Massimiliano Cerchi aims for a more unearthly feel. It’s unique, I suppose.
This is ultra low budget, which shouldn’t limit its mystery, but Mayday loses altitude with it host of painfully stiff cardboard characters and a script that takes itself way too seriously. From the creepy Smokey who sizes up every female in terms of how good they can look on screen, to the attendants jealous of each other for their various crushes on the men – most particularly Anderson – to the briefcase man, who is pointedly made the red herring (sort of), to the Arab doctor easily targeted for all the reasons you think, to many more who are wispy thin at best. It’s impossible to care for any of them, especially as nearly every one of them are over-acted to the point of distraction.
That’s probably half the point, Cerchi – who has been making movies like this since the early 90s – aiming squarely at an audience who crave this sort of schlock. Paré lives in this genre of late and dives deep to keep it as cheesy as he can, the only one in the cast who seems to understand what he’s in the middle of: “This might even be magical text” is a line he reads with all the umph of an actor who clearly understands exactly what kind of movie he’s the star of. It inspires a giggle is what I’m saying.
Full of jump scares and misdirection, Mayday is a brief watch at about an hour and ten minutes, jumping in and swimming about its hokey tale of fear with aplomb. It’s bad enough to be entertaining of course, and strangely, I was rather compelled to stick with it to find out just what was really going on. I guess that counts for something. It’s low budget as I mentioned, but has good production design and a quality look, surely enough to satisfy fans searching the digital shelves for this kind of fun.