Ambulance: Wheels On the Ground, Michael Bay Does What He Does A Bit Better
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
There’s something to be said for low expectations.
Ambulance is a Michael Bay movie in which vehicles don’t transform into anything (except scrap metal when they take a high-speed wrong turn in pursuit of the runaway title conveyance). No robots, no extraterrestrial objects, just wheels mostly on the ground.
With DNA largely spliced from the movie Speed, it’s a carnage-filled action film that is essentially a single extended car chase. Ambulance is a movie that is nothing if not focused.
And okay, it’s nearly two-and-a-half hours long. I’m convinced Michael Bay couldn’t direct you to the nearest Trader Joe’s in less than two-and-a-half hours.
Still, the movie squeezes a lot, both into the confines of a runaway paramedic vehicle and in the wider vistas of Los Angeles, where the chase even takes you to the barely wet L.A. River (which always makes me think of Terminator 2, as close to evoking a robot as this movie gets).
Who knows? Maybe the erstwhile master-of-mayhem Bay took a look at some of the current car chase champs, like John Wick’s Chad Stahelski, or any of the various Fast & Furious directors and said, “Hold my beer.”
Whatever the motivation, Ambulance, while not exactly brain-taxing, has sort-of believable characters, some wit (a scene where surgeons are interrupted on a golf course to direct emergency surgery in a moving vehicle via smartphone is priceless), and some legit white-knuckle moments.
As Ambulance opens, we meet Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), both of whom were raised by the same patriarch, a career bank robber whose torch ended up being passed to the latter. For his part, Will broke with a life of crime by joining the military. On his return, however, his wife Amy (Moses Ingram)’s cancer is going untreated because, well… the American medical system.
He reluctantly hits up the smarmy and arrogant Danny for money for experimental drugs. Instead, he’s offered a chance to be a driver for the bank job of a lifetime.
The actual bank robbery is the biggest cock-up since the Bay of Pigs, Danny’s well-armed crew is already under surveillance by a S.W.A.T. team, and by a couple of cops who’d shown up at the bank just because one of them was sweet on a teller.
(It occurred to me during this scene that bank robberies are kind of anachronistic. Rather than planning a paramilitary operation, maybe Danny should have simply hired a very good hacker to rob the bank. These days, even if you got away with a sackful of money, you’d get caught for suspiciously trying to pay for things with cash. But I digress.)
The last crooks standing, Danny and Will hijack an ambulance, whose occupants are Cam Thompson (Eiza González), a paramedic with the reputation of being able to “keep anyone alive for 20 minutes,” and the love-struck cop (Jackson White), who suffered a gunshot wound being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Cue the carnage! As Will demonstrates his ability to elude anything on the road, even several police interceptors at a time plus the odd helicopter, high-ranking law enforcement from the LAPD (Garret Dillahunt as Captain Monroe and F.B.I. agent Clark (Keir O'Donnell) bicker and semi-admire their prey while millions worth of police cars are destroyed and any number of people die.
There is a point, miraculous-escape-after-miraculous-escape, when miraculous escapes start to become numbing. It may be that every Michael Bay movie could be improved by removing a half-hour or so of mayhem. And Gyllenhaal’s desperate sociopath turns clumsily into a loving-brother in the last act (Abdul-Mateen’s criminal-with-a-pesky-conscience remains consistent throughout), indicating Bay still has an unsure take on human emotion.
Still, I will not give a duck a bad review for quacking. In Ambulance, Michael Bay gives you what he does best, and maybe a bit too much more.
Ambulance. Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza González. Opens in theatres Friday, April 8.