There are two types of people in this world, those who like Michael Bay movies and those who don’t. Ambulance the latest movie from Michael ‘Boom Boom’ Bay, will no doubts delight his fans and cause furrowed brows for those who don’t. Featuring Jake Gyllenhaal channeling his inner Nicholas Cage as a career criminal on a heist gone wrong.
Needing money to cover his wife’s medical bills, a decorated veteran teams up with his adoptive brother to steal $32 million from a Los Angeles bank. However, when their getaway goes spectacularly wrong, the desperate thieves hijack an ambulance that’s carrying a severely wounded cop and an EMT worker. Caught in a high-speed chase, the two siblings must figure out a way to outrun the law while keeping their hostages alive.
Ambulance careening through it’s 2hr 15 minute runtime is your typical Bay movie, with solar flares aplenty, blue hue lighting as you would normally find in one of his films and enough explosions and wanton car destruction as you can possibly muster, Ambulance at times is pretty entertaining. However Michael Bay just can’t stop Micheal Bay-ing the living hell out of proceedings. If he’s not weirdly referencing his previous movies via name checks, he’s either using a drone to film everything with a iPhone or just using some of the weirdest and wholly unnecessary camera pans that you are ever likely to see, that and the rest of the film has either been filmed by the worlds shortest cinematographer, or Bay just decided to film everything from ankle height up.
Jake Gyllenhaal as previously mentioned is either taking the mick with his performance or he just drank a whole bunch of Nicholas Cage juice as his erratic Danny is hugely unlikeable. You don’t find yourself rooting for him at any point as some kind of anti-hero on a quest, more you end up hoping one of the worlds worst snipers bullets actually hit their target. Yahya Abdul-Mateen fresh from the debacle that was Matrix Resurrections puts in a very decent performance as Dannys adopted brother Will. He manages to enfuse a soul into the crash bang wallop that is going on around him. Finally Eiza Gonzalez as Megan Fox 2.0, Cam the paramedic who has to keep the police officer alive in the back of the ambulance and performing major surgery via FaceTime while the ambulance is darting between cars and dodging bullets is something of a feat.
Ambulance is clearly trying to be more of The Rock, Bad Boys or Armageddon ilk (As they are name checked throughout just to remind you of Bays glory days rather than Transformers), but it falls short of that mark. From the escape from the bank which at times seems like a Poundland shot for shot remake of the Heat (Pacino / DeNiro / Michael Mann mini masterpiece), but isn’t even as impressive as the recent and rather excellent Raging Fire.
Michael Bay hasn’t changed anything since the early 90s, and it’s become rather tiresome. Ambulance will no doubt appeal to many and some of the action is pretty well handled, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen time and time again. But if you have a couple of hours and you enjoy city streets being blown apart, then Ambulance may very well be the movie you are looking for.
