AT one point during one of Ambulance’s many chase sequences, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Danny Sharp begins shouting at Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Will Sharp over the complexities of football/soccer, while an army of police cars are chasing after them.
It’s absurd and the film’s numerous corny dialogue with hit-or-miss jokes that are punctuated by frantic editing and a blitzkrieg of explosions is to be expected, because Ambulance is directed by Michael Bay.
The film’s premise is simple: it’s a heist film where the heist goes wrong. There has been plenty of these kinds of films in the past, but it hasn’t been done in the style of Michael Bay’s “Bayhem”.
To differentiate his film from those that came before, which I suspect wasn’t hard, Bay essentially blindfolded himself, hit accelerate and ran this ambulance, I mean film through everything that makes a Michael Bay film a Michael Bay film.
You have explosions, gunfights, aerial chase sequences, land chase sequences, spinning camera shots, low angle shots, Dutch angles, 180-degree tracking shots, montages, shaky camera, excessive drone shots, characters who look like models, and of course, everything looks like its part of a high-budget commercial.
This is Michael Bay’s “Bayhem”, and in small doses, these can be great, but not in Ambulance, because the film’s pacing is a mess, as the film is almost two and a half hours long.
Depending on whether or not the viewer enjoys Bay’s movies, this is either good news or bad news.
The film opens with Will facing difficulties in getting an insurance company to cover his wife’s medical expenses, and in his desperation, he turns to his brother, Danny for help.
Bay wastes no time setting up the relationship between the duo, because barely a few minutes into the film and meeting the Sharp brothers, Will is immediately dragged into his brother’s heist to rob a bank in Los Angeles for US$32 million (RM135 million).
The rest of the film is the Sharp brothers’ descent into hell as the heist immediately goes wrong and they’re chased across L.A. for the rest of the film.
Thrown into the mix is arguably the heart of the film in Eiza Gonzalez’s Cam Thompson, an emergency medical technician on-board the ambulance that the Sharp brothers hijack in their escape.
There’s also side characters that further muddle the pacing because Bay keeps cutting back and forth across all these players.
By its end, Ambulance strains under the pressure of it being stretched out for as long as it has, though I have to commend Bay for being able to translate the frantic nature of the plot and keeping the film “in motion”, much like the classic Keanu Reeves action film Speed did.
That said, watch the film for Gyllenhaal’s performance as Danny, because compared to everyone else, he seems to be having the most fun.
Due to how unhinged Danny is, Gyllenhaal plays the character with gleeful mania that is injected with the self-awareness that he is in a Michael Bay film, and there is no need to be super serious, which is how every other actor is playing their role.
If anything, after his last film, Ambulance is a testament that Michael Bay can be more Michael Bay than the last Michael Bay film.
