Ambulance

Following up on the previous year’s The Guilty, Jake Gyllenhaal throws himself into another intense American remake of a Danish thriller with another high-octane American action director. Ambulance is Michael Bay’s 132-minute remake of Laurits Munch-Petersen’s 76-minute Ambulancen (2005). Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as former Marine Will Sharp who, desperate for money to pay for his wife's experimental cancer surgery, goes to his adoptive brother Danny (Gyllenhaal) for help. He ends us joining his criminal bro on an ill-conceived bank heist that soon leads to them highjacking an ambulance and taking the LAPD and FBI, not to mention a wounded cop and a feisty EMT, on an insane chase through the highways, alleyways, and river basin of LA.

It's been a while since I've seen a Michael Bay movie. In fact, the last one was Armageddon in 1998. It's good to see the old boy hasn't lost his flair for showmanship. Say what you want about Bay's over-the-topitude, but he's not a hack like the myriad copycat clones who've doubled down on his fast-cut, never static, high-concept, high-explosion, high-body-count approach to action pictures. And with this film, he adds a new toy to his cinematic arsenal: the frequent and mostly unmotivated use of high-speed drone shots that swoop and dart around like they were being flown by Tom Cruise. This amps up the visual excitement even more than usual and, I gotta admit, I loved these crazy, who-the-hell's-POV is this? flying shots. For one thing, they hold without a cut for at least a couple of seconds so you can often see what's going on! And what's going on in the wide shots is pretty damn exciting, with most of the stunts and explosions looking like old-school practical effects! 

Ambulance would be a pretty great action thriller were it not for the fact that the characters are either total idiots or saints with halos branded on them. Gyllenhaal's Danny is the worst offender here. This is not one of the actor's twitchy takes on obsessive dudes who don't get a lot of sleep—you may not like those characters, but they do feel credible. Danny is just garden-variety nuts in the way only hoary movie villains can be. He's meant to be a world-class bank robber, a life-long career criminal who learned all the tricks of the trade at his father's side. But the biggest caper of his life is so poorly planned, and the crew he puts together are such imbeciles, it's impossible to take him seriously. Danny is meant to be a crazy, dangerous man, but he comes off about as crafty and scary as Daffy Duck. The cops are mostly morons too, puffing out their chests and dicking about as if they're trying to win a oneupmanship contest of cliched behaviour and best bad movie dialogue. Of course, Will is a good man. A really good man. Did I mention he's a good man? If I forgot, the EMT Cam Thompson, played well by Eiza González (Baby Driver, Paradise Hills, I Care a Lot) will remind you many many times.

Why do movies like this need so many of their characters to be so dumb? Is it just for comic relief? Is it supposed to make them more relatable? Do Bay and screenwriter Chris Fedak think since their movie goes to such ridiculous extremes in terms of plausibility having all the characters be so extreme will help us suspend our disbelief? Because it has the opposite effect. In the hands of an exciting director, a movie like this can be as ridiculous as it wants and we'll happily go along with it if we believe and care about the characters. We just don't in Ambulance, which makes its operatic ending laughably bad. I'd like to recommend Ambulance, as I did have a good time watching it, but I think everyone who would like this would have more fun just rewatching Heat and/or Speed for the umpteenth time instead, I know I would.

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