Ambu­lance

After hav­ing spent many years out­side of the mul­ti­plex – his last fea­ture 6 Under­ground was most­ly left at the whims of Net­flix com­pres­sion – Michael Bay​’s Ambu­lance feels like a direct response to such con­fine­ment. The thun­der­ing sound mix, the ver­ti­go-induc­ing, roller­coast­er-like swoop of the cam­era down the sides of sky­scrap­ers, it all feels dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed to a stream­ing release.

It could be called Bay’s ver­sion of a pas­sion project: the scope is small­er, the script­ing more focused as it fol­lows Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his career crim­i­nal adop­tive broth­er Dan­ny (Jake Gyl­len­haal) in a dar­ing bank rob­bery, Will par­tic­i­pat­ing to fund his wife’s tow­er­ing med­ical bills. Of course the care­ful plan­ning goes side­ways, and fol­low­ing a Heat-style gun­fight in the streets, the broth­ers hijack an ambu­lance with the cop they shot plus the para­medic keep­ing him alive and embark on a pro­longed, mul­ti­stage car chase, not entire­ly unlike Speed.

Gyl­len­haal and Abdul-Mateen II make an enter­tain­ing odd cou­ple – the lat­ter mem­o­rable and mag­net­ic even though the for­mer gets the loud­er, showier role, all frayed nerves and vio­lent mania. As the hostage para­medic Cam, Eiza Gon­za­lez rarely feels help­less, an intense and steely role played entire­ly straight against the film’s luna­cy, but some­how nev­er feels boring.

In por­tray­ing this antag­o­nis­tic trio and the lives they impact, Ambu­lance, to my sur­prise, feels much more con­sid­er­ate than the Bay­hem of days past, much gen­tler and sur­pris­ing­ly less vul­gar and juve­nile in its por­tray­al of its char­ac­ters, before some of them eat lead at least. Not to men­tion that they get to be fun­ny as well as intense, rarely does the com­e­dy in this filmmaker’s oeu­vre actu­al­ly work, but the ban­ter and visu­al gags feel sharp­er than usu­al, the mix of ridicu­lous brava­do and irrev­er­ence works in tan­dem with its adren­a­line-fuelled delir­i­um. (There’s a sequence where Gyl­len­haal lis­tens to ​‘Sail­ing’ on Air­Pods to calm down.)

So, of course, a small­er scale and maybe even kinder Michael Bay fea­ture doesn’t exclude grue­some oper­a­tions, bul­lets tear­ing through skulls and fleets of cars being flipped and con­sumed by explo­sion, but it’s a com­par­a­tive­ly hum­ble effort to what the direc­tor is best known for by now (work that the script keeps remind­ing us of, with char­ac­ters name-drop­ping both Bad Boys and The Rock). Shot across 38 days dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, there’s per­haps a lit­tle bit of that reflect­ed in the wist­ful way it views a bustling city and in how the char­ac­ters all feel the squeeze of finan­cial oblig­a­tion, but real­ly you could drop this back in the 90s with­out chang­ing anything.

That’s to say that the themes of Ambu­lance, a sim­ple trib­ute to the city of Los Ange­les and its first respon­ders, feels some­what out of time, and also sim­ply less inter­est­ing than the fire­works. After some metic­u­lous set­up of the dis­parate char­ac­ters and their stake in the chaos to come, it’s absolute­ly at its best as an exer­cise in loco­mo­tion. A self-described shark of an action movie, Ambu­lance treats still­ness like an exis­ten­tial threat, its some­times bewil­der­ing edit­ing ful­ly com­mit­ted to cre­at­ing con­stant motion even out­side of its set pieces.

It’s a good thing that it does. The con­stant stim­uli might be exhaust­ing for some but when it slows down for some­what ele­giac pho­tog­ra­phy of LA and the murals sig­ni­fy­ing the peo­ple who strug­gle like Will, it doesn’t real­ly hold a can­dle to the excite­ment of drone-mount­ed cam­eras hurtling through the streets or under pow­er-slid­ing cars at break­neck speed. Said cam­er­a­work is a ver­ti­go-induc­ing high­light, though it threat­ens to hit dimin­ish­ing returns as the same visu­al flour­ish­es repeat them­selves bare­ly min­utes apart.

Despite that, excess is to be expect­ed from this par­tic­u­lar film­mak­er, this is the bet­ter side of that impulse. The dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy adds to a sense of raw­ness and imme­di­a­cy rather than the lay­er of sheen that often accom­pa­nies Net­flix orig­i­nals or Mar­vel Stu­dios flicks (or Bay’s own Trans­form­ers), and there’s sim­ply a lot of sat­is­fac­tion in being able to see a big-bud­get, big screen action­er unshack­led from inter­tex­tu­al nar­ra­tive. An admit­ted­ly low bar, but one that works in the film’s favour.

It’s gen­uine­ly aston­ish­ing how the script man­ages to keep adding increas­ing­ly absurd but excit­ing new com­pli­ca­tions, whether that’s psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare being car­ried out on three dif­fer­ent chan­nels, or a surgery being car­ried out in the still-hurtling ambu­lance with instruc­tions car­ried out by con­fer­ence call, bumps in the road also mean­ing rup­tured organs. It gets stalled some­what by some rapid, back-and-forth edit­ing in the film’s ear­ly stages that, in com­bi­na­tion with a lapse in ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, caus­es some con­fu­sion in the stag­ing of a cou­ple of its set pieces.

But for the most part it stays leg­i­ble and excit­ing in how it visu­al­ly main­tains its momen­tum on its way to its corny ​“the real super­heroes are the first respon­ders” end­ing. Until that point, Ambu­lance is just delight­ful­ly unhinged in its exper­i­ment to see how much car­nage can be caused by just one car chase.

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