Michael Bay’s Ambulance is 129 minutes long and never stops to take a breath. The movie has its moments, but also countless plot holes and a pace that leaves you exhausted rather than exhilarated.
Afghanistan war veteran Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a decent, low-key family man, needs $231,000 to cover his wife’s experimental cancer surgery. Out of work and desperate, he sees his brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) about a loan. Danny is the opposite of Will — an adrenalized motor mouth but one who just so happens to have a solution for Will…. For on this very day — in just a few minutes, as a matter of fact — Danny is not only off to rob $32 million from a downtown Los Angeles bank, he’s also short a wheelman.
Guess who happens to be a great wheelman? Yep, Will.
But Will has gone straight. The whole point of his enlisting in the Marines was to clean up his life, which meant getting out from under Danny’s corrosive influence. Nevertheless, Will agrees.
Then, thanks in no small part to Danny’s team of idiots, the bank robbery goes sideways, a cop gets shot, and Will and Danny end up commandeering an ambulance with the injured cop (Jackson White) and a cynical EMT worker (Eiza González) as hostages.
And so, a 100-minute chase begins…
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Ambulance is two parts Speed (1994) and one part Wages of Fear (1953). An ambulance that cannot stop without Will and Danny being caught speeds through the streets and highways of Los Angeles ala Speed. The Wages of Fear-dynamite-on-board is the wounded police officer, who could die at any time.
It’s no small thing that Bay mostly uses practical, in-camera effects. After the devolution of the once-great Fast & Furious franchise into a gravity-ignoring, intelligence-insulting, CGI’d videogame, it is nice to see actual cars fly through the air, actual glass smash, and actual vehicles fly through actual streets.
The problem is that it’s all so chaotic and illogical.
No one who sits in a movie theater munching on smuggled-in Twizzlers is happier to suspend disbelief more than yours truly. Unfortunately, Ambulance is too big a lift. Okay, I’m willing to accept the coincidence that Will just happens to show up in need of money minutes before Danny is leaving for a bank robbery. I’m barely willing to accept Danny still needs a wheelman, and Danny happens to be a wheelman. What I never bought is that Will would agree. For starters, it is immediately obvious that Danny’s team is a team of unstable morons doomed to fail. The movie has two hours to explain why a loving family man, a decent guy with a good head on his shoulders, would agree to something so reckless. The surgery bill is nowhere near enough motivation, not when you’re facing life in prison, your wife dying while you’re in prison, and heaven only knows what happens to your baby.
The chase itself never makes logical sense. We’re told the authorities don’t want to do anything drastic to stop the ambulance out of fear for the well-being of their fellow officer. Fair enough. I get that. No spike strips, no running off the road. That makes sense. What makes no sense is why, despite countless opportunities and with 20 police cars on the scene, no one ever surrounds the ambulance to slow it down to a stop.
Danny and Will escape one tight spot after another, but we’re never shown how or why. At one point, they’re chased along the famous Los Angeles River by two helicopters, and whatever move they make is supposed to be super clever — something involving a bridge and going the wrong way down the 10 Freeway… I still don’t get it.
Also, where’s all the Los Angeles traffic?
****MAJOR SPOILERS****
Finally, who are we supposed to root for? At first, our protagonist appears to be poor, put upon Will, but this guy ends up doing some pretty awful stuff — not the least of which is shooting a police officer and causing countless police and civilian car crashes. In the end, we’re still supposed to sympathize with Will, and he does redeem himself to a point, but to a point where a police officer lies about who almost fatally shot him? The best thing in the movie, Abdul-Mateen’s dignified screen presence, almost sells this, but come on…
Then there’s the gay FBI agent (with a man-on-man kiss thrown in for no good reason) who just so happens to know Danny because Danny took Criminal Justice courses to learn FBI tactics, a plot point we’re expecting to pay off that doesn’t.
For a while, it feels like we’re supposed to root for the cops until they stand around letting a black guy die re: George Floyd.
Finally, in the end, we’re told Cam is the hero of the story because female Hispanic or something…
Moral ambiguity is something to appreciate in a movie. It keeps you on your toes as unpredictable characters make it impossible to figure out what might happen next. People, real people, are complicated, and it’s their contradictions that make them interesting. Ambulance would have been a lot more interesting had its moral ambiguities not fallen precisely where the Woke Gestapo demanded they fall.
****END SPOILERS****
Ambulance’s biggest problem is that it’s utterly draining instead of exciting, hectic instead of fun. On top of the usual camera whooshes and super-slam-edits that made Michael Bay Michael Bay, someone gave him a drone, and that sucker whoops all over like a cocaine monkey.
It’s just too much, too illogical, and no fun.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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