Ambulance Rescues Michael Bay’s America from Propaganda

Michael Bay displays wild, perceptive citizenship in his rambunctious action flick Ambulance. Black EMT driver Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) flies a huge, rippling Stars and Stripes at his home, specifying his situation as a diligent blue-collar worker. But because he can’t afford his child’s experimental medical procedure, he appeals to Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), a white madcap and materialist whom he identifies as “brother,” and joins his reckless money-grabbing scheme. The title Ambulance signals each man’s crisis, and that circumstance of being in crisis — shared by everyone within the radius of their adventure — makes this the most “American” American movie of the year. Its clarity is restorative now that the U.S. is deeply mired in propaganda.

Bay transcends the political pundit’s grift of misinterpreting “democracy.” He’s an eccentric whose observation of contemporary America combines Will’s sensitivity and Danny’s brashness. Bay finds excitement in everyday realism, charged beyond Grand Theft Auto. Never mundane, he expands on the lamest of all action genres, the bank heist — as exemplified by Michael Mann’s fatuous, overrated drama Heat — to find the form’s sensual, kinetic potential. Everyday dazzle.

This alertness to life creates a hastened vision. Will and Danny hijack a medical van operated by beautiful EMT tech Cam (Elza González). During a comic, double meet-cute, we’re alerted to her expertise by way of the comment “You can keep anyone alive for 20 minutes.” Part of the narrative caprice is seeing Cam beat her own record in a series of elongated chases while Will and Danny elude the cops and the FBI, all in the same vehicle, hearkening back to Buster Keaton’s slapstick classic The General. It’s not just an existential gag but essential to Bay’s perpetual-motion storytelling.

Ambulance’s title recalls that Alex Cox Repo Man joke about a can of generic beer, but Bay puts Champagne inside. He implodes the chase, heist, and war-movie genres. His affinity for mechanics starts with Danny’s glossy car showroom, then the velocity of assorted expeditions, zooming through urban streets and structures with fast glances at aspects of Los Angeles. There’s a hilarious camera pirouette around the proverbial ghetto sneakers hanging on telephone wires. Skyscrapers are to Bay what mountains were to Bierstadt. Cantilever camera shifts replace his usual 360° spin, often turning on a dime. These are the most splendid, knockabout car crashes since Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express and Joseph Kahn’s Torque.

Bay’s challenge in Ambulance is to tell an all-American story about capability and camaraderie, class and humanism, while constantly moving. There’s even a high-tech 5G game of telephone, featuring surgery via cellphone in a scene that rivals Altman’s bloody audacity in M*A*S*H. (“The spleen has an artery at the bottom,” Cam is instructed. Take that, fans of Cronenbergian body horror.)

The way Bay’s camera dances with and between his actors enlivens the emotional drama as Claude Lelouch once did. Ex-Marine Will explains this urgency as “situational awareness, that’s all.” So this isn’t just sheer sensationalism. As in his best film, Pain & Gain, Bay captures a brotherhood of misfits to accurately portray the at-odds reality that contemporary America is going through. Situating Will, Danny, and Cam amid a band of desperate Afghan and Iraq War vet robbers and ahead of FBI teams who outsmart themselves (Garret Dillahunt brings his dog Nitro to work; Keir O’Donnell is in marital counseling with his environmental-attorney husband) satirizes the government betrayal that was the subject of Bay’s Benghazi history 13 Hours. Here, scenes of wounded vets on U.S. streets are kinetic poetry suggesting civil war; they evoke Afghan/Iraq camaraderie that’s forgotten in today’s social discord.

Will and Danny’s actual brotherhood is seen in childhood cowboy-and-Indian flashbacks that are pop shorthand, like Kanye’s Life of the Party music video. Gyllenhaal’s intensity recalls Pacino’s Dog Day Afternoon juggling of social and personal anxieties. (Danny’s best line is either “Cashmere!” when he’s covered in fire-extinguisher foam or “We’re a locomotive, WE DON’T STOP!”) It’s all metaphor, sensitive to America’s current disunity though without the sense of tragedy felt in S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged across Concrete.

Yet Ambulance expresses more about modern American life than any other recent film or media distraction. Bay has a showman’s understanding of the requirements for a happy ending and excitation. The film’s blue-collar refrain is “let me do my job.” Bay might be the only Hollywood director who fully understands it.