Essay: 'Ambulance' (2022)

That Michael Bay feeling

Photo: Universal Pictures

The most cliche and apt way to describe an action movie is to call it a “roller-coaster” or, if you’re feeling especially dramatic, a “thrilling roller-coaster ride.”

In 2019, legendary director Martin Scorsese famously compared modern-day mega-budget blockbusters like The Avengers to theme parks. That observation triggered a soft boy culture war between film critics and fans, the hoity-toity and the hoi-polloi, cinephiles, and popcorn jockeys, and the insult hurling between these various sects was incredibly mind-numbing. This tiresome conversation is still happening in the darkest corners of so-called Film Twitter, or whatever it’s called now.

Scorsese is right, of course.

I enjoy thoughtful flicks about the human condition… and explosions. The bigger, the better. When it comes to movies, I am greedy. I want intelligent dramas, superhero fairy tales, bleak ghost stories, and car-chase movies that also want to make their audiences cry. Is that too much to ask for?

This brings me back to roller coasters, which are fun because they are fast and dangerous and trigger buckets of adrenaline, and all you have to do is sit there, buckle in, and scream. They sell reckless speed, safely. Buy a ticket and rocket up and down. A good coaster flattens you with gravity one moment, and the next moment you’re floating.

Michael Bay’s 2022 heist-gone-wrong thriller Ambulance is a perfect example of a theme park ride—it surprises and rattles teeth, too. At the very least, the Marvel movie recipe would be vastly improved by a pinch of Bay’s style and chaos.

Ambulance is, first and foremost, fast. It hurtles forward from opening titles to closing credits. Somebody must have given 59-year-old Michael Bay a drone for his birthday because Ambulance is fueled by airborne shots that zoom over buildings, dive like falcons, and chase after cars like avenging angels. It is all quite breathtaking, especially on an IMAX screen.

If you love that Michael Bay feeling, then the good news is Ambulance has it in spades. Fireballs, helicopters, scowling men. It’s one of his best movies in a long time, a thrilling roller — well, you get it.

Like Scorsese, Bay is a legend, albeit a different kind of legend. He’s one-third Tony Scott, one-third Steven Spielberg, and one-third Michael Bay, a frat boy daredevil with a big goofy heart. He’s a filmmaker who loves his actors and is not afraid to fill the screen with intense close-ups before blowing something up.

Bay’s skill at filming sweeping action scenes is only equaled by his famously kinetic editing style. The man has a knack for telling as much story as he can as quickly as humanly possible, sometimes with the help of an Aerosmith rock song. And then — without catching a breath — it's back to business: cars flying through the air, spinning, and then crashing into other cars.

His 1996 opus, The Rock, starring Nic Cage as a bumbling FBI nerd and Sean Connery, at peak silver fox, as the only man to ever escape Alcatraz, teaming up to break into the aforementioned prison, which is being held occupied by evildoers with an evil plan, is a frenetic cinematic masterpiece. A few years later, he directed Bruce Willis in Armageddon, about a team of oil drillers trained by NASA to stop a killer asteroid headed for Earth. That motion picture is a rocket.

In 2013, Bay challenged himself creatively by directing Pain & Gain, a colorful true crime comedy about bodybuilders misbehaving starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson that can only be described as Bay's attempt at directing a Coen Brothers movie, a quirky, cynical morality play. Does it work? Almost.

I don’t want to suggest Bay’s oeuvre is flawless. Four out of five of his obnoxious Transformers movies are junkyard scrap (the first one is underrated, and then he kept remaking it, over and over, each a little more ridiculous than the previous one until we get one starring Anthony Hopkins and his robot butler.) Bay can be self-indulgent, and when he is, he parodies himself. At his worst, his fast cuts and his total disregard for physics can trigger motion sickness or, even worse, boredom.

But this new picture of his is anything but.

Like the titular emergency vehicle, Ambulance is loud, colorful, and intense. It is a chaotic L.A. noir about bad choices that respectfully steals from Michael Mann’s noble bank robber masterpiece Heat and also Speed, the best movie ever made about a runaway bus. Ambulance isn’t wholly original, yet it isn’t a soulless corporate tentpole born on a whiteboard in an executive boardroom. This film is loud, messy, and exhilarating, and it is not simply content made for screens.

The movie opens with a few dewy-eyed scenes between a black and white boy who turns out to be the two main characters. These brief, halcyon moments signal that Ambulance is a movie about humans. Or, at least, aspires to that.

In Ambulance, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Will, a vet who can’t afford his wife’s life-saving medical treatments, so he has no choice but to reach out to his adopted brother, Danny, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

It is both Will’s unlucky and lucky day: Danny is a wildly successful criminal who just so happens to be putting together a brand new score, which goes pear-shaped pretty quickly when a young cop interrupts what should have been an easy-peasy holdup of a Federal bank.

Before you know it, that cop is shot, and our brothers decide to save his life by hijacking an ambulance. Yes, the ambulance we’ve all been waiting for. Inside is the third most crucial person in this movie, Eiza González’s Cam, a world-weary EMT who is as electric as the paddles she uses to shock the wounded cop back to life. González is tremendous as the greatest first responder in all of Southern California.

She also combusts with the two leads who make the movie. As Danny, Gyllenhaal is a charming creep, my favorite kind of Gyllenhaal. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Will is a hero backed into a corner, and whenever Ambulance threatens to fly off a bridge, Abdul-Mateen II’s gravitas brings it back to Earth.

The movie is a relentless chase through the fourth most important character: sunny Los Angeles, specifically, downtown L.A. Like other Bay movies, Ambulance also features an eclectic cast, including Garret Dillahunt as an eccentric cop on the hunt and his flirty computer-genius sidekick, played by Olivia Stambouilah.

Ambulance was made on a relatively small budget for Bay, a paltry $40 million, but it punches above its weight. Bay is on a mission to outdo Bay himself.

There is a surgery scene that takes place as the ambulance is outracing an armada of cop cars, and the entire sequence is a sloppy sandwich of tension: at one point, trauma doctors video conference in to help Cam’s character operate on a dying cop and if the body horror and bullets aren’t enough, the battery runs out on the tablet that was being used to beam her instructions. It’s too much!

This is big entertainment, ready-made to be seen in a theater. But watching it on a flatscreen is okay, too. Ambulance is currently streaming on Starz or something similar. You can also rent it. Bay bookended this masterpiece with more sentimental memories of Danny and Will when they were young and innocent. After two hours of near-constant drums and dizzying mayhem, he wants his audience to cry. You won’t, but thanks for trying, Michael. I appreciate you.

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