Ambulance: Movie Review

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza Gonzalez, Garrett Dillahunt
Director: Michael Bay

Director Michael Bay's latest has a very simple premise, stretched out as far as it can go, and injected with the kind of Bayhem you've come to expect.

Based on the 2005 Danish film of the same name, Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen II star as Danny and Will, two step-siblings, brought together when circumstance demands. When Will urgently needs money to fund experimental surgery for his wife and is frustrated by benefits groups, he turns to Danny for help - but Danny co-opts him into a bank job to seize $32 million.

However, the heist goes wrong - and they end up kidnapping an EMT worker (Eiza Gonzalez, spunky and easily able to hold her own) in an ambulance and hightailing it across Los Angeles with the police in hot pursuit.

With its jumpy set up, cameras swirling round in the sky and then flying down buildings, before looping through as many structures as they can, it's clear this is a Bay-joint early on. 

Building up from a montage of life on the streets and forcing an intersecting narrative (cops, ambulance workers, thieves) into something relatively cohesive and unexpectedly tense, it takes some 30 minutes before someone shouts "It's go time" and the bullets start flying and the cars start being destroyed.

While it's fair to say that Bay's direction of Chris Fedak's adapted script brings the requisite tension to the fore, there's a feeling about 100 minutes in of a script-induced sag which no amount of camera trickery can cover up.

From a vein-popping Gyllenhaal, jumpy and nervy, but nailing the delivery of some of the script's more ludicrous lines and scenarios (talk of flamingos and odd one=liners, as well as surgery via FaceTime) being the stand out) to a solidly humane Abdul-Mateen II, Ambulance delivers more of a vicarious thrill than perhaps it ought to.

By accepting and embracing what it is at its core (a heist chase movie that only cares for its central protagonists), Ambulance proves to be heartstoppingly good and blockbuster fare at its best. With nods to Unstoppable's train shenanigans, Ambulance doesn't care about what it embraces from the past and what it spits out for the cinematic future.

While Bay's fifteenth outing may be one of his better movies, even a little more tighter editing and jettisoning of some elements would have served to make this a ride to remember. As it is, Ambulance is well worth the ride along, a compelling piece of big screen entertainment that, at its core, is just about "two guys trying to get home" after a very bad day in LA.