Review: Ambulance
Ambulance, directed by Michael Bay, tells the tale of Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a U.S. Marine veteran who’s down on his luck when he desperately needs money to pay for his wife’s surgery but Uncle Sam is letting him down. So desperate times call for desperate measures as he turns to his crazy adoptive criminal brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a job to help pay for the surgery, causing Danny to recruit Will for a super dangerous bank robbery. The robbery goes awry and the brothers are forced to hijack an ambulance manned by EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González) to make an emergency getaway (no pun intended). With the feds hot on their trail, the brothers must now drive this metaphorical locomotive to freedom and not stop for ANYTHING.
It’s been a while since I properly reviewed anything from Michael Bay. The last film I saw from him was Transformers: The Last Knight back in 2017 and I remembered genuinely despising that film. I didn’t even bother watching 6 Underground on Netflix but based on what I heard I’m not really missing out on much. Bay’s best when not butchering a beloved franchise is usually delivering the “theatrical experience" for moviegoers. This film is his first theatrical release in five years, and it’s a (partly) original IP, so I went into this movie hoping to just shut off my brain and enjoy the Bayhem on screen.
Michael Bay’s Ambulance, however, wouldn’t let me turn off my brain; there were too many things going on in the plot forcing me to engage in this long and extremely painful joyride.
There are things to enjoy in this film, don’t get me wrong. For one, Jake Gyllenhaal is an absolute blast to watch; you can tell in every scene he’s hamming it up in he is having fun with it. There were also a lot of fun and crazy sequences that you’d only see in a Michael Bay film; there are plenty of explosions and gun fights and the laws of physics are amply ignored, allowing Bay to let his imagination run wild.
The only tradeoff with that however is a couple things. One: Bay’s imagination is clearly limited; a lot of what’s going on here has been done before in recent years but done much better. Had this movie come out in the 90’s or something then this movie would be groundbreaking, but we live in an era where we’ve been blessed with what car chase movies can really do by films like Baby Driver or Mad Max: Fury Road. These movies make Bay look like a product of his time; the only real evolution Bay has done with his films since the days of Armageddon and Bad Boys is add a couple fancy drone shots zipping down skyscrapers.
Two: this film is almost two and a half hours long. A lot of the action sequences lose their momentum as the film slogs through a overly complicated plot and some seriously under-developed characters. The movie does nothing for me to care about what’s going on with these characters, yet it forces me to care by subjecting me with too many flashbacks and exposition scenes while doing nothing to make me remember their own names, let alone who they are. Pair all that with the blandest action movie score I’ve heard in a long time and some truly horrendous editing and you got yourself an unpleasant two and a half hours at the theater.
Overall this was not a good movie. There’s nothing about this movie that warrants my enjoyment and quite frankly I don’t feel sorry for it tanking at the box office as of this review. If Bay wants my attention he’ll have to do a lot more than make things go boom; he’s got to work on his characters more in addition to making things go boom. Bay was never one to care about reviews anyways so I doubt he’ll listen, but considering this film is not the usual money making machine he’s used to cranking out his whole career maybe he might for once actually listen to what his fans and critics has to say.
Final Verdict: 3/10