Ambulance
Big, loud and dumb - but a helluva lot of fun.
Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an ex-Marine, who is having trouble sorting insurance money to cover his wife’s experimental treatment for an illness that could very well take her life. He reaches out to his no good brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who signs him up for a bank robbery. However, when the robbery goes wrong, they shoot a cop, and steal the ambulance that is taking him out of the bank; along with the EMT in the ambulance, Cam (Eiza Gonzalez). Cue a high speed, at times danger-fraught car and helicopter chase through the streets of downtown LA, as Danny and Will try to find a way out of their situation, all while the three of them try and keep the cop alive.
Directed by Michael Bay, Ambulance is the sort of movie that slaps you across the face with the sheer ridiculousness of its plot and production. It’s the sort of classic Bayhem that prioritises whimsical camera angles, explosions and one-liners over any sort of actual intrigue or intelligence. It’s also the sort of film where you can just switch your mind off, and have a lot of fun.
Let’s touch on the plot, or what there is of one here. We’re given a huge swathe of ‘that’ll do’ lines to generate the action in this film. Our protagonist Will has a sick wife, although we don’t know what she’s sick with, because it doesn’t matter. We don’t really know what Danny does. Our female protagonist / hostage Cam again gets little to know backstory. Then there’s a swathe of side characters who make varying degrees of impact, but who all share a common trait of having largely no information proffered about them bar one interesting fact to define their personality.
The chase itself, and the ways in which the duo try and escape, feel underthought and rushed. The filmmakers evidently came up with the idea of having them steal an ambulance, and then just sort of winged it from there. Couple that, too, with the ridiculousness of some of the setups; in particular the spleen surgery via Zoom in the back of a moving ambulance.
Visually, the film is wild. Bay is no stranger to making things go boom, and here he swamps the film in mammoth practical car crashes, explosions, and more. The camera is claustrophobically tight on the eyes and faces of the characters throughout, which ratchets up the uncomfortability and tension. He also seems to have just discovered what an FPV drone is, and puts about 650% too many of these shots in.
Ultimately, though, all of this can sort of be forgiven. For fans of the bank heist genre, waylay your expectations. This is no smartly plotted and thought out Den of Thieves, nor incredibly well scripted Hell or High Water. This is a straight up dumb movie. It’s a piece of cheer worthy explosion porn, and you can either get on board with that and have a great time, taking the movie for what it is, or you can not.
