‘Ambulance’ review: Michael Bay’s worst movies are still just Tuesday

Auteur director Michael Bay loves himself a chance to occasionally pull back from his high-octane, all-nonsense Transformers movies—or in the case of 6 Underground, Transformers-adjacent movies—so he can produce something as middle-energy (which for him is still several cups of coffee past reasonable health limits) as Ambulance, Somewhere on the broad, Bay spectrum between the fantastically masculine LA mania of Pain and Gain and the aggrandizing military infomercial that is 13 Hours, Ambulance tells a familiar story in recognizably illiterate ways, amped up with enough special effects to make it all seem like you’re escaping somewhere interesting, at least momentarily.

Bay’s latest is a remake of the 2005 Danish film, also titled Ambulance but now with the marketing flourish of “LA” added to the title for reasons that surely stress the common denominator of Bay’s intended audience—not to be confused with the legions of moviegoers who enjoy his work at least somewhat ironically, to be clear. The film centers around a heist gone wrong, in which a group of bank robbers headed by a fittingly megalomaniac Jake Gyllenhaal and his more even-keeled adoptive brother, an ex-Marine played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, storm a bank in LA and find themselves trapped in an ambulance version of Speed.

Eiza Gonzalez plays their hostage, a “too committed to the job at the expense of her emotions” paramedic trying desperately to avoid Gyllenhaal’s wrath as she struggles to keep a wounded cop (Jackson White) from bleeding out as the ambulance dodges hordes of LA cops trying to outdrive and outsmart them. Throughout Ambulance, it seemed like Bay was trying to tire us out, too. At over 136 minutes, the film pads itself out with at least an extra hour of redundant zooms and zips and drone techniques that exist purely as toys for Bay to play with. At least one person is having fun.

And yes, there is a sizable contingent of today’s blockbuster audience that wants nothing more than brainless flights of whatever kind of fancy Ambulance is supposed to be. Where the pathos is about as elementary as good con, bad con. On the police side of things, Garret Dillahunt gets ample opportunity to infuse some much-needed breathing room as the “captain in charge of things, sure,” though he’s given a sparring partner only much later in the cat and mouse game when Keir O’Donnell arrives unceremoniously and perhaps needlessly as the FBI Agent who supposedly holds the key to the main villain’s past. Only he really doesn’t beyond adding fluffy pillows of exposition that were already communicated well enough through Gyllenhaal’s gracefully unhinged performance, which far outpaces Chris Fedak’s scattershot screenplay.

Bay’s films are rollercoasters, no question. Thin on story, yes, geared for the utmost octane exhilaration, yes. They’re also bumpy and overlong, the kind of coaster that is fun for a few seconds until you realize your head is going to be banging against the headrest for the equivalent of over two hours. At least with the Transformers movies, that concussive runtime was accompanied by expansive plots and attempts at nerdy sci-fi world building, incomprehensible as they could often be. Here, it’s the same drops, loops, and spin-outs over and over until you can’t tell if you’re watching the credits or if everything just went dark because you’ve passed out.

It’s remarkable how Bay continues to double down on his mission to make movies that say the least possible. You’d think at this point in his career we’d be seeing at least some semblance of an upswing, a desire to learn from the past and at least try and make something a bit more substantial than movies that felt dated in 2013, somehow coming off as exploratory and insightful comparatively almost a decade later. Maybe that’s why the trailer essentially gives away the whole film (I didn’t see the trailer until after I watched the movie). At least that way, you can save not just money, but your time, too.

Ambulance opens in theaters April 8. Watch the trailer here.

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