Thirteen years ago, I called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — Michael Bay’s self-engrossed auto erotica — “the most totally awesome artifact ever of the end of the American empire.” But only a few years later, in Transformers: Age of Extinction, Bay contrived to have a car — not even an alien robot one, just a regular car — punch a man in the face.
What is now clear to me is that any notion of “Peak Bay” is transitory, fleeting: we may be there at this moment, but another Michael Bay monstrosity is always looming, and the filmmaker is never content to rest on bombast past.
And so, herewith, Ambulance.
Even grading on the Michael Bay curve, this movie is borderline incoherent… which is something I’ve said about previous Bay flicks, but lucidity, lack thereof, is another realm in which the director is constantly one-upping himself. It’s not the plot that’s incoherent, but mostly because there’s almost none to speak of. (The script is by Chris Fedak, a TV writer making his feature debut.) What’s incoherent is the action, which is a problem in a movie that is nothing but action.
Ambulance is a little more than a feature-length car chase through the streets of Los Angeles as bank robbers Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal: Everest, Southpaw) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II: Candyman, Us) run from law enforcement in a stolen ambulance. And when I say “through the streets of Los Angeles,” you’ll mostly have to take my word for that: apart from a sequence in the iconic and instantly identifiable LA river — you know, that concrete channel with some puddles in it — this could be taking place almost anywhere. And not only is there a dearth of big-scale geographic context at play, there is even less small-scale physical context, on the street-by-street level. Police cars carom around, coming out of nowhere, not so much following the ambulance but tumbling into a screaming deluge of metal and rubber.
There could be cinematic drama in the violence, visceral suspense in the anticipation of how a particular automo-duel will resolve, elegance in the high-speed driving. There could be visual ballet to the rollovers and the explosions; this is Bay, so cars explode if you look at them crosseyed, of course. But it’s all just random vehicular chaos enacted with the same energy of a four-year-old smashing his toys into one another.
This goes on for more than two hours, all on the same mindlessly intense level. Ambulance is like a trailer for itself, all forced ferocity with no downtime. (Maybe a nonstop car chase works in Ambulancen, the 2005 Danish film this is based on, which runs 76 minutes. It’s relentless here, and not in a good way.) This is theoretically unfurling in something close to real time, except any temporal context is a mess, too: in one scene it’s early afternoon, with high sunlight and bright skies, then it’s sunset, the light low and shadows long, then we’re back to afternoon again. Because Bay is incapable of not fetishizing that “magic hour” of golden sunrise or sunset, even if it makes no chronological sense to do so.
Bay’s cinematic compulsions always win out, no matter how inappropriate they are. Will is supposed to be a good guy who just needs to raise money for his wife’s medical bills… and just as we learn this, Bay deploys his other can’t-miss fetish, the America flag waving majestically in the breeze — in that golden magic hour, natch — with zero irony, as if paying for health care via crime were the right and proper order of things. (I’m back to wondering if the apparent satire of Bay’s Pain and Gain was, in fact, accidental.) Will ends up getting sucked into Danny’s heist because of their supposed adoptive-brotherly connection, but Bay’s slow-mo-flashback attempts to cement that relationship are about as convincing as a margarine commercial, and Will’s status as a good guy is challenged, to say the least, by the absolute citywide carnage he is complicit in. Danny doesn’t give us much to cheer for, either: he is an unrepentant criminal psychopath, and Gyllenhaal doesn’t try to make him even evilly charming.
That leaves us with paramedic Cam (Eiza González: Godzilla vs. Kong, Bloodshot), stuck in the back of the ambulance with a police officer (Jackson White) who was shot during Danny and Will’s robbery. (It’s more than a bit preposterous that the thieves are worried about the criminal-justice implications of letting the cop die and not those of the aforementioned citywide carnage — the body count of innocent bystanders will be enormous.) González is a compelling screen presence, but too many things that the script forces her character to do are absurd and, at the last moment, ultimately make her too ridiculous to believe.
How in love with himself is Bay? He manages to squeeze in complimentary references to not one but two of his own previous films: Bad Boys and The Rock.
It’s exhausting here at empire’s end.
more films like this:
• Ambulancen [Netflix UK]
• Speed [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | HBO Max US]
When I saw the trailer, I thought: There’s the potential for one good joke here. If you’re driving an ambulance, you can go on the craziest car chase, and people will be reluctant to pull you over. But that joke is funny for around about one scene, and I’m not sure the screenwriters even included it in the movie.
I recall nothing like that.
I saw this with a friend who loved it and I did like the actors but too much of it, especially the opening bank robbery, was shot nauseatingly. I love kinetic camerawork (Speed Racer should be taught in film schools, and my favorite recent cinematography is constantly moving, like West Side Story or Old) but doing constant jerking and shaking and whipping without ever seeing it through made me nauseous. Despite all that I still had an okay time?
The emergency surgery scene was ridiculous in the right way and I wish the whole movie had more of that energy.