Ambulance
One of my favorite anecdotes about Michael Bay is how, when he was approached to direct “Phone Booth,” he asked about whether Colin Farrell’s character could leave the phone booth. In the appearance on “The Daily Show” he relayed this, Farrell then joked about how a Michael Bay action sequence around a phone booth would look. This came to mind while watching his latest film, “Ambulance,” for reasons we will get into.
This is an adaptation on a Danish thriller, and the screenplay by Chris Fedak does a good job of creating an economical, but dense enough, narrative for Bay as a bank robbery goes awry, and two of the robbers are on the run in an ambulance with an EMT and an injured cop, with the entire LAPD after them. The film is, essentially, a 136-minute long car chase, and it’s the strongest film Bay has made in at least 15 years.
I think Bay is still below .500 for me, on account of three terrible “Transformers” sequels, although even some of his other movies I’m not high on “Pain & Gain” and “6 Underground” I’m willing to give another chance in the future. Here, it feels like he’s back to what made “The Rock” and “Bad Boys” the first such a strong 1-2 punch- a stripped-down narrative with clear moral stakes for everyone involved, even if Bay’s ultra-stylized visual language has been enhanced over the years. Here, a lot of the film involves “drone cinematography,” and that might give you motion sickness at times as the shot starts high, and dives to street level; as the film progresses, however, it becomes more obvious why he wanted to use it for that approach, as he can get angles and shots that would normally require CGI. I’m sure there’s still some at work, but it feels as visceral as any movie he’s ever made.
Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a military veteran whose struggling financially. He has a new baby boy he has to look after, and his wife needs an expensive surgery that insurance is not covering. A job will help, but it’ll only go so far for what she needs. He heads off for an interview and his wife implores him again not to go to his brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). Since childhood, they’ve taken opposite directions in life, but Will is desperate. As it so happens, he goes to Danny on a day when he’s prepping for a bank robbery in downtown LA, and he could use another body. Will reluctantly agrees, but when things go south, and a cop has been shot, he, Danny, the shot cop and an EMT (Cam, played by Eiza Gonzalez) are racing through the LA streets in an ambulance, trying to outrun the police, keep the cop with them alive, and keep themselves alive. And yes, the film has an explanation of how Will (a black man) and Danny (a white man) could be brothers.
Bay keeps the action moving while the drama takes place in that ambulance- Can they keep the cop alive, not only because it was an accidental shooting, but for leverage for the police not to take them out? Can Will keep Danny from going off the deep end like their father would have? Will Cam, who prides herself on her ability to keep people alive, be able to handle the duress?- moves the narrative forward. One of the reasons I thought about the “Phone Booth” story was because it feels like Bay found a way to tell a story where the character drama is contained within a single location, and still manage to make a traditional action movie. The central performances by Abdul-Mateen II, Gyllenhaal (who clearly enjoys playing unhinged characters), and Gonzalez keep us invested with the drama while Bay creates some of the wildest action set pieces of his career. This is peak Bay filmmaking, and yes, sometimes we get some truly incoherent moments of action, it’s one of the cleanest visual pallets (Roberto De Angelis’s cinematography deserves some end-of-the-year consideration) he’s ever created, with Lorne Balfe delivering a thrilling score that is as good as any action score we’ve gotten in recent years. Yes, of course it goes too long (this should be 100 minutes at most), but when Bay is on fire, and keeping his bad habits to a minimum (the “idiot humor” tone of a lot of his films is well-moderated here), few filmmakers can touch him. “Ambulance” is a pretty great effort from the filmmaker.
