Hectic instead of energetic, Bay’s nonstop action movie Ambulance is a poorly engineered vehicle.
Hectic instead of energetic, Bay’s nonstop action movie Ambulance is a poorly engineered vehicle.
N ot having seen a Michael Bay movie in years, I was in the mood for one. An L.A. bank robbery/ambulance chase movie? Sounded fun to me. You can count on Bay to deliver pleasing clichés about coolly capable macho guys, women who are as indestructible as they are beautiful, nonstop one-liners that are almost clever, and ecstatically overdone action scenes. Bay has made several good movies, notably The Rock and 13 Hours, plus one great one, Pain & Gain, and now that he has reached his late 50s, I assumed he might have learned to tame his youthful excesses a little.
Wrong! Bay exhibits the tastes of a 57-year-old middle-schooler. Ambulance, in which Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play brothers who steal $32 million from a bank and then flee in an ambulance when their score falls apart, is a Michael Bay picture on steroids, which is to say it’s steroids on steroids. Picture an ADD toddler with about four Red Bulls in him. Do you enjoy being stuck in a room with a flaming-cannonball toddler? I don’t. The movie’s demented energy is draining rather than fun.
Bay’s tendency to overdo everything is evident right from the start of Ambulance, a remake of a Danish film by the same name from 2005. Bay and screenwriter Chris Fedak introduce the central protagonist, Will Sharp (Mateen) as not just a poor-but-honest black guy whose wife desperately needs experimental surgery that costs $200,000 he can’t afford, but also a decorated war hero with a Purple Heart. Will won’t even use the F-word when begging for help from his brother, Danny (Gyllenhaal, who is not quite nailing the cocky Tom Cruise thing he tries here).
Danny is quite successful at his job: professional bank robber. He’s been knocking down four of them a year for ten years and appears to have millions. Yet he can’t pony up a mere $200k to save his sister-in-law’s life? No, you see: He has invested all of his net worth in his next score. If Will wants the money, he’ll have to immediately and without any training whatsoever join the crew of the next heist. I have to fault Will for his judgment here: Having known Danny his whole life, he should have figured out by now that his brother is a psychopath, and working for him will lead to very bad things.
Wouldn’t you know it, the heist goes awry not because it wasn’t expertly carried out (though Bay skips over that part) but because a cop (Jackson White) has a crush on one of the bank tellers and wanders in to ask for a date during the holdup. Will ends up shooting the cop, which makes it hard to pull for the guy the rest of the movie, though Mateen has a strength and dignity about him that almost makes this character work. Bay and his screenwriter carry on as though the law will eventually make a distinction between the nice bank robber and the mean bank robber, even after the bodies start to pile up.
Since I was in the mood for a jolt of non-superhero blockbuster cinematic ridiculousness, I could have forgiven a lot. I could have overlooked, for instance, such coincidences and contrivances as having the top FBI man on the case (Keir O’Donnell) be an old friend of Danny’s. Danny, by the way, studied criminology so he could get inside the heads of law enforcement but his main tactic for eluding cops is to drive really fast. I could even have overlooked the preposterous complication that Danny (whose actions lead to the deaths of dozens of cops in the movie) has a little nugget of goodness in him that causes him to keep the cop his brother shot in the vehicle throughout the movie and even to help the paramedic on board (Eliz Gonzalez) perform surgery to try to save the officer’s life at 60 mph instead of just dumping him before fleeing.
What I can’t forgive is the movie’s fantasy that you can drive really fast during the day anywhere in L.A. Anyone who tries to do this is likely to break free for no more than three minutes before running into an implacable wall of traffic. And no, driving maniacally does not make the other million vehicles on the roads disappear. Again and again and again, Bay lines up a dozen screaming Dodge cop cars in perfect pyramid formation motoring toward the desperadoes in the ambulance, making it clear there is no escape route and then . . . escape happens anyway. How it keeps happening, I have no idea. Bay doesn’t know either. He has made a movie-length chase scene that simply skips over the “how?” part of the ambulance’s ability to elude capture. The movie looks like it was edited by a schizophrenic meth head who was being tormented by a swarm of bees while riding the Tormentor roller coaster.
Bay’s machine-gun cutting not only makes it impossible to figure out how Will and Danny keep moving — at one point, their genius idea is to go up a one-way highway ramp in the wrong direction, as though you could get away with this for more than ten seconds — it doesn’t even establish the absolute basics of where various objects are in relation to one another. Bay simply floods your retinas with a bedlam of cop cars flipping over, helicopters swooping down, and the ambulance speeding away again.
Stop with the frantic cutting and show us how this is supposed to work, my mind kept screaming, not that I could hear myself think above the nonstop brain-pounding of the musical score. Ultimately, Bay, for all of his swagger, simply lacks confidence in his storytelling ability, and instead tries to con the audience with slickness and sizzle. Extending a crescendo for two hours defeats the purpose of a crescendo. Action filmmaking? Ambulance is more like action painting, with Bay as Jackson Pollock, madly splashing cans of paint all over his canvas and asking us to admire the mess.