Ambulance
Directed by:
Michael BayCinematography:
Roberto De AngelisComposer:
Lorne BalfeCast:
Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Moses Ingram, Garret Dillahunt, Colin Woodell, Keir O'Donnell, A Martinez, Devan Chandler Long (more)VOD (4)
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Over one day across the streets of L.A., three lives will change forever. In this breakneck thriller from director-producer Michael Bay, Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), in desperate need of money asks for help from his career-criminal brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who instead offers him a score: the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million. But when their getaway goes spectacularly wrong, the desperate brothers hijack an ambulance with a wounded cop and ace EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González) onboard. In a high-speed pursuit, Will and Danny must evade a massive law enforcement response and keep their hostages alive, while executing the most insane escape L.A. has ever seen. (Universal Pictures UK)
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On the one hand, it’s regrettable that Bay lost his perversely inflated budgets by liberating himself from the Transformers cash cow and thus has to make formalistic compromises after years of unbridled lavish spending. Bay himself bitterly admits this when he says that some of the CGI shots in Ambulance are “shit”. Still, it’s great to again see this John Waters of the mainstream and Dario Argento of action movies run riot. No one else has the formalistic skills of the master of superficiality. I don’t understand the criticisms that you have to shut down your brain to watch Bay’s films. On the contrary, you can fully enjoy Bayhem only when you switch your brain on and set it to camp mode. Bay doesn't make realistic films and he has no interest in classic narratives. At their core, his films cannot be enjoyed passively, so that viewers are “only” entertained or moved by them. This is beautifully illustrated by a comparison between the original Nordic dramedy Ambulance and Bay’s variation on it. The Danes took the genre elements and strained them through a filter of empathy and levity, thus creating a perfect film for viewers. Conversely, Bay took only the basic premise from the original narrative. He threw out everything civil or (cinematically) realistic and spread out before the audience his world of advertising über-reality and soap-operatic emotions, where everything is turned up not just to eleven, but rather to twenty. As in Zdeněk Troška’s works, in the Bayverse all of the characters express themselves mainly by screaming or barking out simple sentences with the nature of slogans. The less space characters have in the film, the more they are exaggerated caricatures modelled not on everyday reality, but on the manmade illusion of PR and music videos. All of the cars appear to be new and polished, the female protagonist has perfect make-up even in the tensest moments of a field operation and the police are recruited exclusively from the ranks of juiced bodybuilders. Like the aforementioned Argento, Bay doesn’t bother with bullshit like believability and logic, but is only and primarily concerned with making every single shot as stylish and spectacular as possible. And in that respect, Ambulance is an absolute feast. Bay has reached the (for now) peak of his ADHD filmmaking, wagering on one goofily contrived and spectacularly self-indulgent shot after another. In addition to that, he got drones to play with, or rather he got some skilful drone operators, whom he let completely off the leash. Besides the phantasmagorical drone shots and real action with a minimum of digital effects, what’s most amusing about Ambulance is Bay’s attempt to ride the wave of current progressive trends in Hollywood cinema. But because Bay himself is the essence of the term “douchebag”, his version of diversity and representation inevitably takes the form of an absurdly boorish caricature. Bay has simply proven again that his films primarily induce viewers to shake their heads in disbelief. And when properly tuned in, there is wonderful pleasure in that.
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The characters get into a situation that started to really entertain me only in the last quarter of the film. Everything before that is trite routine, wrapped up in an attractive Bayhem form. And that’s not for everyone. Epileptics can’t help themselves. What I found most lacking in Ambulance is a more imaginative screenplay. The only way the film attempts to move the action-packed ambulance ride along in terms of plot is by gradually revealing the relationships between the characters (who knows whom from where and why). And these are in no way interesting and don’t bring anything important to the emotional drive of the film. Some emotion comes only in the final minutes, but it’s nothing more than traditional, slightly embarrassing Bay-esque sentiment.
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If you want to break it down, this movie can be easily analyzed regarding any logic it may have, and a Michael Bay movie is just that, a Michael Bay movie. As a complete no-brainer, it is very entertaining with impressive stunts. Unfortunately, his tokenistic camerawork and editing techniques are really freaking overused in this movie. He should at least cut back on the coke in the future.
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In Ambulance, Michael Bay may have toned down the explosions, but this is still an action-packed caper, where logic sometimes takes a back seat to an impressive atmosphere. I thought I'd seen this story somewhere before, and it was only in the database that I realised I'd once seen the Danish version. From a technical point of view, I would criticise the film for the camera shots that are sometimes too cluttered – at times it almost looked like the cameraman was high on something. Story-wise, as I mentioned, there is more than one over-the-top moment (especially during the operation of the policeman, who is almost forgotten in the last act), but that's kind of Bay's thing. In the end, the film tries to play on emotions quite blatantly, pushing the envelope disproportionately hard compared to the rest. The cast was overall fine – perhaps only the pompous Captain Monroe was annoying. All in all, it was a slightly overlong but entertaining one-off, with a decent soundtrack (at times some of the tones evoked Interstellar).
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All you have is a skeleton crew and a script pulled out of your ass. Who you gonna call? Michael Bay! Ambulance is a film that was made out of Bay's simple need above all to do something at a time when there was nothing to do, and the way the film was made in spite of that can often be so painfully seen that it comes across as a bit guerrilla. Especially during the shootout at the bank, you see crew members or security guards guarding the set in almost every other shot. At the same time, the script gives the impression that it was written on the spot, and anyone who has seen a single movie about paramedics and cops and robbers and is also fixated on realism and logic will die inside a bit here, because everything here sort of lands well on the first try and moves on without a second thought. Combined with the pacing of the film, it all feels spontaneous, like little boys playing cops and robbers in the backyard, creating subplots on the fly without thinking about their purpose to the story thus far, just so they can get back to riding and shooting. For me that's a perfectly fine way to make an action movie, and when the only director on the set who's been yelling into a megaphone enters the picture, we're in for a boogaloo, with drones and cars racing each other and all the sparkling, banging, dusting, blurring, and backlighting, where the important thing is not what exploded, but that it exploded. No one puts the camera down as much as Bay, few people today understand how much an action movie relates to the environment in which it takes place. And you all surely must be looking at it wrong, so pop open a beer, stick a smoke in the corner of your mouth, feet (in shoes) on the table, and give it another go! I want this place red by the end of the week, you hayseeds.
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