25th Mar2022

‘Ambulance’ Review

by Matthew Turner

Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Garret Dillahunt, Jackson White, Moses Ingram, Keir O’Donnell | Written by Chris Fedak | Directed by Michael Bay

Remaking a foreign language movie might seem like an unusual step for master-of-mayhem Michael Bay, but that’s what’s happened with his latest movie Ambulance, which is based on the 2005 Danish thriller Ambulancen. In fairness, Bay’s idea of a remake is basically just to make it an hour longer and add explosions, so it’s pretty much business as usual, comprising 136 minutes of action and chaos.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays former soldier Will Sharp, who’s struggling to pay the mounting medical bills for his wife’s (Moses Ingram) upcoming operation. In desperation, he turns to his ne’er-do-well brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who somewhat implausibly recruits him for a $32 million heist that’s happening in about thirty minutes’ time.

Will reluctantly agrees, but the heist goes sideways, leaving Will and Danny to hijack the titular ambulance in order to escape. That makes things extremely difficult for the ambulance’s paramedic, Cam Thompson (Eiza González), who’s trying to save the life of nice guy Zach (Jackson White), a police officer who was shot by Will after a scuffle and is currently bleeding to death.

Michael Bay has built his career on delivering high-octane action mayhem, and that’s exactly what you get here, with the surprisingly resilient ambulance somehow managing to evade multiple vehicles during the mother of all police chases. Accordingly, Bay’s cameras are in overdrive throughout, seemingly making up for a prolonged absence from action cinema due to the pandemic-enforced lockdown.

In fact, the camerawork is a lot of fun, with Bay clearly getting a lot of literal mileage out of a new drone cam toy. To that end, his cameras whizz up and down buildings, perform twisting maneuvres in the air and swoop under bridges, just because they can, as if all he’s really interested in doing is showing off.

That said, there are a number of exciting action highlights, including a double helicopter chase-slash-shoot-out through the Los Angeles river bed and a tense sequence whereby an inexperienced Cam has to perform surgery via a Zoom call while the ambulance is swerving all over the place.

All three leads deliver decent performances, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with, so they’re very one-note in execution. Gyllenhaal tries hard to jazz his character up a bit – him yelling “THIS IS CASHMERE!” when his jumper gets ruined is a particular highlight – but it backfires because he’s all over the place from one moment to the next and you never get a clear sense of who he really is.

On a similar note, the script isn’t remotely bothered with things like logic or sense (even for a Michael Bay movie, joining a heist on a moment’s notice takes some swallowing), and only cares about getting from one explosive set-piece to the next as fast as possible. To that end, the script’s most amusing failure is the way it relies on cutesy flashbacks of two innocent-faced children to convince us that Danny and Will really are brothers (Will was adopted into Danny’s crime-friendly family).

Despite his best efforts, Bay can’t quite sustain the breakneck pacing for the full 136 minutes and Ambulance drags a little in the middle, though it rallies for a decent climax and, crucially, doesn’t feel like too much of a cop-out in the process. In short, this delivers pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a Michael Bay movie about a hijacked ambulance and you can interpret that statement whichever way you wish.

*** 3/5

Ambulance is in cinemas from today.

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