Directed By Michael Bay

Starring – Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza Gonzalez

The Plot – Decorated veteran Will Sharp (Abdul-Mateen II), desperate for money to cover his wife’s medical bills, asks for help from the one person he knows he shouldn’t, his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). A charismatic career criminal, Danny instead offers him a score: the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million. With his wife’s survival on the line, Will can’t say no. But when their getaway goes spectacularly wrong, the desperate brothers hijack an ambulance with a wounded cop clinging to life and ace EMT Cam Thompson (González) onboard. In a high-speed pursuit that never stops, Will and Danny must evade a massive, city-wide law enforcement response, keep their hostages alive, and somehow try not to kill each other, all while executing the most insane escape L.A. has ever seen.

Rated R for intense violence, bloody images and adult language throughout

(1) Ambulance – Official Trailer [HD] – YouTube

POSITIVES

When Michael Bay isn’t making gargantuan epics or smashing our childhoods with humiliating emphasis, he’s actually a pretty solid director who crafts some of the most riveting thrillers of the past thirty years, with “Ambulance” being certainly no different in this regard. Blessed with some of Bay’s most impactful and immersive direction since 2013’s “Pain and Gain” became one of my biggest surprises of that year, Bay combines a sleek elaboration of the lens and its various movements, with amplifying sound designs, that help coherently construct an opera of devastation that rattles Los Angeles to its core. In particular, much of the various sweeping shots of the crime scenes, tailing movements through bullet holes and other unorthodox angles, and jaw-dropping photography in establishing shots of the city of angels, grants the evolving conflict an inescapable range of urgency and vulnerability, and when combined with thorough characterization of the most vividly informative manner, continuously conveying the stakes in the atmosphere that hang wonderfully over the many dynamics that serve as combustible elements simmering their way to some highly intense action set pieces. On the screenplay front, I believe with confidence that the film not only earns every minute of its 135-minute run time by fleshing out the many colorful characters and relationships that convey deeper meaning in motivation, but also in the smooth, fluid pacing scheme of the screenplay that is constantly moving, despite the ability for this simplistic plot to reach redundancy quickly. On the performance scope, the three leads all supplant compelling turns that allows each of them time to steal the show, but for my money it’s Gyllenhaal and Gonzalez convention-breaking turns that are most memorable by film’s end. Eiza’s introductory confidence and calm as Cam gives way to a regretful longing for the character that puts everything, she lost into perspective on this one fateful day, and Gyllenhaal’s unorthodox ferocity while chewing enough scenery to put holes in the screen is unlike anything he’s ever tackled in a lead, even with the unsettling, slimy Lou in 2016’s “Nightcrawler”. In returning to those key ingredients to the screenplay, it feels like a new character is introduced every twenty minutes, and while that often can convolute and contort the clear and concise direction of a script, here it’s the exact opposite, as the extensive ensemble helps to keep the internal brotherly dynamic fresh in the limitations of its claustrophobic captivity, all the while helping to decipher much of the moral ambiguity that the brothers are constantly running from confronting within themselves. It leads to a gut-punching climax in every emphasis of the term, combining sentimentality with regret in a way that culminates with one of the more meaningful and lasting images to a story with an ample amount of heart to its emotional registry.

NEGATIVES

While the aforementioned action does trigger an anxious uneasiness that never relents, not all technical merits for set pieces are equally as effective in the merits of their consequential influence. In particular, the rampant spontaneity of the editing, with all of its alienating strobing, is beneficial enough in maintaining the grip on the intensity and urgency of the environmental aspects, but at a cost to the vulnerability, which goes absent when imagery is stitched together this with forcefully. The movements of the lens combined with unlimited cuts are a chore to the ocular senses to redefine what we’re interpreting with each passing vision, and considering this aspect elevates with the increase in speed or physicality in conflict, it creates a contradicting barrier that forces audiences to look away during the moments they really shouldn’t, all in order to keep them from motion sickness, which I felt on the border of attaining during a couple of key sequences. In addition to this, nuance in dialogue is still a major problem for Bay, who audibly spells as much out in conversations that couldn’t weigh any heavier on the nose if you parked an ambulance on top of one. The kind where characters appear to be talking to each other, but in reality, are talking to the audience without looking directly at them, spelling out as much about the various backstories and situations that not only wipe any talent of nuance or subtlety from the occasion, but also supplant with them instances of predictability that conveniently find their way to the surface only minutes after they were previously alluded to. Finally, and most consequential to the integrity of the experience is the indulgence of humor that Bay is most famous for, weighing heavily on the claustrophobic captivity that the film’s drama entirely lends itself towards. Though this is nothing new for Bay films, as “Bad Boys” and “Con Air” brought with them an underlining humor and humility that exhaled the necessary levity that the darkness of those films demanded, here its dependency encroaches more often than I would’ve preferred, even leading to scenes and characters whose whole intention is to elicit a silly conversation that feels surreal because they hang in the balance of this very surreal tragedy unfolding before us. The humor isn’t particularly strong, nor is it endearingly complimenting to the film surrounding it, weighing far too heavily towards a creative direction that wholeheartedly doesn’t require it.

OVERALL

“Ambulance” is another boisterously thunderous action flick from Bay that stomps its way through Los Angeles with intense relentlessness. Though Bay leans heavily on a few of the same tropes that ultimately condemn previous efforts, the talented ensemble and elevation in technical merits prescribe an all thrills popcorn flick with all of the saturated nutrition of Bay’s geographic devastation coming to the rescue of audience expectations.

My Grade: 7/10 or B