Ambulance (2022).
“We don’t stop.”
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Chris Fedak
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Eiza Gonzalez
The Stage.
In this remake of the 2005 Danish film of the same name, two brothers find themselves trapped in an ambulance in a high speed pursuit after a bank robbery gone wrong. A tough EMT and a cop who’s bleeding out are also onboard.
The Review.
I have not seen the original film from 2005, so your enjoyment may hinge on that if you’re a big fan. I don’t know. I used to play a lot of Grand Theft Auto V, and when friend of the show Moose and I would get together, we’d pass the controller back and forth looking to see who could survive the longest with a five or six star wanted level - you basically cause as much carnage as possible and then play a game of trying to stay alive while law enforcement tried everything they could to put you in a wooden box. Ambulance is like the film version of that. It’s an extremely dumb, goofy, corny, two hour adrenaline shot featuring frenetic camera work, a boatload of wrecked vehicles, and Jake Gyllenhaal chewing scenery.
I love…LOVE a good car chase. During The Rock, there’s a great car chase between a Lamborghini and a Hummer and this feels like two hours of that. There’s also an interesting dynamic inside the ambulance. Gyllenhaal plays Danny, a man who has apparently robbed 38 banks in the last decade. Shouldn’t one or two banks be enough? That’s like four a year. His brother Will, an ex-military man who’s having trouble with his insurance company finds himself along for the ride with the promise of a big payday that would surely get his wife an operation that she needs. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. Also in the cab are Cam, an EMT who treats her job as just that - a job. She doesn’t care about the patients after they’re out of her care, but she’s going to do her best to keep them alive from point A to the emergency room. And finally, there’s Zach, a rookie cop who’s bleeding out from multiple gunshot wounds, a situation that has everyone in the rig working together so that he doesn’t die on their watch. As they speed through Los Angeles looking for a way out of this jam, Captain Munroe, a special investigation unit leader and an FBI agent are using every tactic in the book to slow them down and bring the brothers to justice without risking the officer’s life. The film rarely gives you a chance to breathe, it’s full speed ahead from the beginning of the film to the end.
Gyllenhaal is really fun as Danny, a supposed criminal mastermind who knows the inner-workings of the FBI, but honestly never actually seems smart. He consistently makes the wrong decisions and is continuously bailed out by others. Danny is always very wide-eyed and high strung, leading to some hilarious moments. There are some one-liners during the ride that got big laughs out of me and my wife. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays his brother Will, the “sympathetic” character on board. I think the goal was to make us root for him, but I’ll be honest, he was really stupid and deserved to go to jail for a thousand years. He also makes some really dumb decisions in the name of ‘honor’, but you’re in a massive car chase that has definitely taken the lives of many, you can’t be sympathetic at that point. They should have just made both brothers kind of evil from the start and just made Eiza Gonzalez’s character the hero, but that’s just my opinion. They live in the shadow of their father, a bank robbery legend who was apparently just as brutal as he was greedy.
The film is shot well and uses a ton of drone shots - I mean an exhausting amount. It feels like we see the same, “Drone goes up the side of a building, does a spin, and arcs down to see the chase” shot ten times, but a lot of the shots feel really kinetic and fun. I’m stunned that this only had a 40m budget. It looks way more expensive than that. In addition to tons of cars getting absolutely decimated, we get explosions, shootouts, helicopters, a grenade launcher, and a bank robbery that seems to go on forever. I think the initial robbery could have been edited a bit differently to give us a better sense of space because once the shit goes down, it’s tough to understand where people were in relation to each other, but it was still really exciting.
The End.
I am one of those few people who still gets really excited for Michael Bay films. I’m not a ‘stan’ by any means - he has made a lot of films that I don’t like, but he really just makes films designed to entertain the widest possible audience. In terms of action films, I’ve always thought that The Rock and Bad Boys were his best - both of which are referenced to in this film - and while Ambulance doesn’t top those, it’s still a really entertaining time at the movies. I think there are two kinds of people who are going to like this; the first are people who don’t care if movies are dumb, as long as they’re entertaining, because if you look at this in the context of realism and plot holes, you’re going to have a field day, and the second are people who love Jake Gyllenhaal. I must say that I’m really looking forward to the Blu-ray because I’m anticipating some typical Bay special features that explain how they did some of the things they did.
