In a time of strife, division, fear and war, one might think the moment would be for a nostalgic escape into the retro-excessive trash-movie mystique of the ’90s – an age when action-thrillers are big , loud and decadent, were ‘rebellious’ and ripped off as often as not by ‘Die Hard’. However, “ambulance” might make you reconsider that impulse. Directed by Michael Bay, who has dealt in many kinds of excess over the years: massively scaled kiddie-gizmo excess (the “Transformers” movies), apocalyptic sci-fi excess (“Armageddon”), fake-authentic historical Excesses (“Pearl Harbor”) and good old buddy movie excesses (“The Rock” and “Bad Boys”). A propulsive violent and outright persecution thriller, “Ambulance” stakes a genre that we could easily describe as ’90s excess.
Set on a long day in Los Angeles, it tells the story of a bank robbery gone spectacularly wrong. And it all boils down to this: After a street showdown trying to outdo the machine gun in Michael Mann’s “Heat,” two of the robbers hijack an ambulance carrying a medic and a wounded police officer, and then they speed through the streets of LA, pursued by an army of squad cars, police helicopters and news teams. It’s “Speed” crossed with the OJ Bronco chase, crossed with “Die Hard” on an EMS van, and it’s all served up in a pedal-to-the-metal mode of over-the-top hyperintensity known as Bay to the Max.
In “Ambulance” there is no such thing as a shot of a vehicle driving down a freeway that isn’t immediately followed by an operatic build-up to this angle shot rushing through the air. The camera doesn’t just move, it throttles — it slides, tumbles and shoots forward, navigating through tunnels and turning corners. And the film’s editing revives the old cut-cut-cut machismo of Here’s What-is-made-of-a-former-music-video-director. It’s an action montage on Adderall. It’s all meant to be relentlessly hyped, but all too often the silliness of Bay style is that it brushes on the aggressive energy of techno filmmaking like icing and replaces it with a situation that’s actually authentically suspenseful.
Early on in “Ambulance,” Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Marine who served heroically in Afghanistan but now struggles to take care of his wife (Moses Ingram) and young son, searches for his Brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), for a loan and maybe a small job. But Danny, a career criminal, gets a desperate Will to join him in a heist on the Federal Bank in downtown Los Angeles, which he plans to commit later that afternoon.
Does Danny have an elaborate plan to pull off a $32 million heist? Amazingly no. He’s got a crew of gnarly henchmen, including one they call “Mel Gibson” (because he looks almost as scary), but after he gets the cashiers to hit the floor, the maskless men walk around as if there no one could identify them. When a naïve cop, Officer Zach (Jackson White), asks to come into the bank to flirt with one of the teller, it’s only a matter of time before their cover is blown.
The sloppy lack of design – not only in the heist, but also in Chris Fedak’s script, which is more about late ’80s/90s attitude (“Those sons of bitches are about to have a really bad day!”) than it is logic – exists audience a strange relationship with Danny and his crew. Do we want these jokers to succeed? Even as film criminals, they don’t do much to earn our affection or respect, and it’s clear from the start that they stand almost no chance. (Will they outrun the entire LAPD in a hard-charging ambulance?) But if not, what are we spending this 136-minute film rooting for? Abdul-Mateen’s Will, the noble straight-shooter, is our entry point into the film, but for a long time Gyllenhaal dominates the action in the chattering Psycho-Lite mode, and the character’s whimsical gruffness is wearisome rather than charismatic.
Danny and Will are not biological brothers – Will was adopted by Danny’s father and raised as his sibling. But this father, as we learn, was himself a notorious criminal; The whole family background thing is a little abstract and a little ridiculous. Chris Fedak has evidently studied early Shane Black’s if-it-feels-good-f—k-it scripting method, and he comes up with at least one scene too crazy for words: Cam (Eiza González), the Spitfire Paramedic Geisel, on the phone with her surgeon ex-boyfriend to walk her through an impromptu surgery without anesthetic on Zach, who has a bullet in his spleen that ruptures right in front of us. At this point, you might be seriously wondering if you’re having fun yet.
The ’90s school of overripe action-excess (Bay! Willis! “Con Air”!) spawned a few classic films, like the transcendent gonzo-but-plausible-at-every-moment “Speed,” but mostly it was about Shut off your brain and turn up the volume. There’s a place for that, and I’ll admit that as a critic at the time, I was too harsh on absurd, poker-faced intergalactic ballistic romp like “Armageddon.” “Ambulance” is simply too much of a bad thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to keep you entertained, but it’s joyless: an escape story that’s far from a great escape, for for all its movement, it goes through the motions.
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