With his latest movie, Ambulance, Bay has once again proven that he does his best work on this kind of grounded mid-budget action thriller. Best described as a Bayhem take on Dog Day Afternoon, Ambulance is sharper, smarter, and more character-driven than the average Bay-helmed blockbuster. In the Mann/Scott tradition, Ambulance is a no-nonsense, old-school thriller that wastes no time with exposition and jumps into the action as soon as the audience knows enough about the protagonists to care what happens to them.
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The early scenes cross-cut between a few day-in-the-life sequences introducing all the key players and their interpersonal conflicts – two bank-robbing brothers with opposing ethics, a sympathetic EMT, and a cop – before the inciting incident pulls them all together. The bank robbery is foiled, the cop gets shot, and the brothers take both the paramedic and the bleeding cop hostage in a stolen ambulance. The heist kicks off the action nice and early, and once Bay goes from exposition mode to action mode, he maintains that level of intensity until the end credits.
Bay’s style is defined by every shot being a “money shot,” and Ambulance cinematographer Roberto De Angelis stays true to that ethos with swooping Steadicam shots ominously following the police chase like the demonic spirits in The Evil Dead. The digital camera movements are less impressive. They’re too loopy and convoluted to evoke David Fincher’s more captivating omniscient cinematography. The digital camerawork doesn’t compare to the visceral sensation of following an actual camera zipping in and out of speeding police cars or between the pillars of an underground parking lot. Mercifully, Ambulance doesn’t lean on CGI and uses real cameras wherever possible.
The L.A.P.D. seemingly loaned out their entire garage to the stunt team – and Bay dreamt up many inventive ways to total their vehicles on film – but a lot of the police chase action feels like a Let’s Play video of a GTA V player stealing an ambulance and taking the cops on a joyride around Los Santos in cinematic mode. The most exciting sequences in the movie take place inside the ambulance. Smashing cars through bus stops and fruit stands is a lot of fun, but the tension between the characters in the ambulance is much more engaging. In one delightfully zany yet surprisingly tense sequence, the EMT performs an impromptu surgical procedure at 60mph with a bunch of qualified surgeons FaceTiming in on a tablet with low battery to talk her through it.
Whereas Tony Scott’s Unstoppable baked its workers’ union conflict into the action-packed runaway-train plot, Ambulance crams all its heavy-handed social commentary into a couple of lines of on-the-nose dialogue. The story of a war veteran who’s denied an insurance payout and resorts to robbing a bank to fund his wife’s life-saving surgery is powerful enough on its own, but the movie spells it out. And after this message is introduced, his military background gets swept under the rug along with the First Blood themes and he becomes a standard protagonist who just wants to keep the hostages alive.
The central theme in Ambulance is brotherhood. And while the script’s emotional scenes don’t depict the communication between brothers nearly as poignantly or profoundly as Good Time and The Darjeeling Limited, it certainly helps that they’re played by two top-tier actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Gyllenhaal has a lot of fun with the role of an eccentric, volatile, gun-toting maniac, while Abdul-Mateen provides plenty of nuance as the more empathetic and morally driven counterpoint. In the back of the ambulance, Eiza González gives a scene-stealing supporting turn as the abducted paramedic.
As usual, the humor is pretty hit-and-miss. Bay has a wacky comedic sensibility that doesn’t always land. Sometimes, the out-of-left-field one-liners work, but most of the time, they just come off as baffling. When the EMT aboard the ambulance tells Gyllenhaal’s bank robber that the cop desperately needs to get to a hospital, for some reason, he replies, “Yeah, well, I wish I didn’t have herpes.” But the comedy works more often in Ambulance than it does in Bay’s other films. The movie actually has some big laughs, mostly drawn from Gyllenhaal’s frustration with the hostages (and a great soundtrack juxtaposition with Christopher Cross’ “Sailing”). There are also some fun self-referential nods to Bay’s previous hits: one character quotes Sean Connery’s “f*** the prom queen” line from The Rock, while another compares his cool cop car exit to Bad Boys.
Clocking in 10 minutes short of Goodfellas’ runtime, Ambulance does begin to feel a little repetitive as its second act drags on. Bay could’ve allowed a couple of shots of L.A.P.D. squad cars getting destroyed to end up on the cutting-room floor to streamline the film’s length. But it’s hard to complain about the bloated runtime of an action-packed movie like this, because there’s always something exciting going on. From the moment the heist goes awry, it becomes obvious that there’s no way this can end well for the bank-robbing brothers. But exactly how the police chase will play out remains unpredictable right up to the bitter end. Ambulance might not be a transcendent masterpiece that reshapes the cinematic landscape, but it’s a solidly made edge-of-your-seat action thriller worth seeing on the big screen.
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