Ambulance, 2022.
Directed by Michael Bay.
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, and Moses Ingram.
SYNOPSIS:
Needing money to cover his wife’s medical bills, a decorated veteran teams up with his adoptive brother to steal $32 million from a Los Angeles bank. However, when their getaway goes spectacularly wrong, the desperate thieves hijack an ambulance that’s carrying a severely wounded cop and an EMT worker.
Michael Bay is the oft-vaunted god-King of maximalist filmmakers – a vulgar auteur in the most literal sense who is both maligned and celebrated in near-equal measure for his tireless, exhausting commitment to sensory bombast.
To that end, a Bay-directed film centered around an ambulance fleeing the cops might seem positively modest, even quaint for an artist best known for spectacles involving apocalyptic threats and shape-shifting intergalactic robots.
Yet Ambulance is actually an act of cinematic expansion, based on Danish director Laurits Munch-Petersen’s 2005 film of the same name. The original, a modest high-concept production clearly hemmed in by its low budget, in many ways feels like the perfect project for a Michael Bay remake, no matter Hollywood’s history of rubbing its dirty mitts all over robust international cinema.
The 2005 film isn’t really robust at all, though, and certainly doesn’t have the cultural cachet to make a remake seem sacrilegious. And so Bay, Hollywood’s living embodiment of a rich boy playing with every Hot Wheels car in the box, elevates that tantalising initial premise with his big-budget, mega-scale retooling, defined by epic swooping drone shots, big dramatic acting, and so, so many explosions (of which the original had precisely none).
Much as this might all sound like a series of back-handed compliments to Bay, there’s an odd purity to Ambulance that his more scornful, adolescent-skewing movies – especially his Transformers films – lack. It is a fascinating example of a filmmaker using all the available tools to push the bounds of action cinema in directions both exhilarating and utterly draining.
The plot is mercifully devilishly simple; war vet Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) needs to come up with more than $200,000 in order to cover his wife’s much-needed surgery, and so touches base with his wheeler-dealer brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal).
But rather than offer a loan or lump sum, Danny invites him to join a bank heist, which he does out of desperation. It all predictably goes horribly wrong, leaving the brothers the only survivors and fleeing an aggressive fleet of LAPD officers. Things only get worse when Will and Danny hijack an ambulance, which in the back contains two passengers – a cop (Jackson White) wounded during the heist, and the EMT, Cam Thompson (Eiza González), trying to save his life.
As storytelling, Ambulance is built from the most basic parts imaginable; a “hero” driven to do a morally questionable, highly destructive thing to save his love, as is basically the primer for a propulsive if certainly not-lean 136-minute chase film.
Yet while it may eventually tire, Bay’s latest is mostly a thunderously entertaining piece of work while you’re living in it; the almost impossibly slick, roving camerawork – Bay using drones with all the enthusiasm of a kid who just got one for Christmas – married to blistering sound design and an electrifying score from regular Bay collab Lorne Balfe.
While certainly lacking the artistry of recent blockbuster The Batman, Ambulance is similarly a ruthlessly persuasive advertisement for the merits of the cinema experience. Those who invest will certainly get their money’s worth with every damn penny of the production evidently splashed across the screen.
Again, not a smart movie, and there are moments where the fitful editing and spasmodic camerawork will overwhelm even the hardiest viewer, but on the balance of assessment, Bay’s commitment to sustained intensity is both impressive and weirdly charming.
Preventing it from being a wholly empty-calorie affair, however, is the skilled acting triumvirate at the core. Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never found a movie he couldn’t class-up, is clearly having a whale of a time as the unstable loose canon of the two brothers, pulling just far enough back from the edge of camp to ensure there’s still a palpable sense of danger about him. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is his straight-laced confederate and the more personable of the two siblings, though as beleaguered first responder Cam, Eiza González gets the most human character to sink her teeth into.
Yet for fans of pure action cinema the appeal will primarily rest in watching Bay soar his camera around the streets of Los Angeles as it becomes a wreckage-strewn battleground between an improbably-armoured ambulance and the assembled might of the LAPD.
Throw in some cheesy character melodrama, an unexpected wealth of genuinely solid humour – including some hilarious winks to Bay’s own work – and the sly suggestion that the director is more acutely aware of the silliness than he first seems, and Ambulance becomes an easy film to recommend as a big, dumb rollercoaster ride.
Michael Bay injects a weapons-grade dose of steroids into his remake of the so-so 2005 Danish thriller of the same name, which is powered at all times by the director’s shameless commitment to ludicrously entertaining excess. It may, however, understandably be both too much and too little for some audiences to take.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
