Michael Bay. The name alone elicits a polarizing reaction. While some enjoy his loud, overblown movies, others hate them for the same reason. He always manages to deliver a bang for your buck, but a lot of the time, it comes at the expense of story and characters.
His latest vehicle (no pun intended), Ambulance, falls somewhere in between. It isn’t the incomprehensible drivel that the Transformers sequels were, but he still has a long way to go with finding a plot to balance his penchant for pyrotechnics.
Ambulance stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp, a professional criminal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (the remake of Candyman and The Matrix Resurrections) as his adopted brother Will, a former Marine.
Will’s wife needs cancer surgery which costs $231,000 and Danny gives him the chance to get the money by helping him rob a bank in Los Angeles. They escape with the money via an ambulance, but soon they’re cornered by every cop in L.A. and the rest of the movie becomes an elaborate chase. This is where Bay’s strengths come into play.
Eiza Gonzalez costars as an EMT whose taken hostage. She does what she can to convince Will to abandon Danny as he becomes increasingly hostile as the chase progresses.
Enough about the plot. The only reason anyone goes to see a Michael Bay movie is for the action. In this movie, he gives us the typical chases, shootouts and explosions that might make some audiences need to buy a hearing aid afterward.
Ambulance is sort of a cross between Heat and Speed, but it doesn’t have the intelligence or originality that those movies had. Instead, the movie has all of the subtlety of a heavy metal band trying to keep the noise down.
Granted, Bay is still in his comfort zone and the action is technically proficient at times, but he also still suffers from the same philosophy of “more is more.”
After a while, I got tired of seeing cars flip and explode with rapid-fire editing while the characters shout out dialogue.
This marks an improvement away from the Transformers sequels, but Bay still needs to work on finding a story that fits the action successfully.
Ambulance isn’t exactly DOA, but the script does come close to flatlining.
Grade: C+
(Rated R for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout.)
