Ambulance (2022)

★★★
Michael Bay is a good director when he just focuses on telling the story and resists his tendency to be in awe of his own vision. He demonstrated that with Pain & Gain and especially 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. He achieves that for the most part in Ambulance. There are times when he can’t help himself, though depending on how much you dislike Bay, that might apply to the whole movie. He was determined to make a tight action picture for little money, yet the final product suggests the studio wrote additional checks to cover Bay’s excesses. Like its titular vehicle, the movie careens wildly and recklessly. Despite the previews, I still wanted to see it. Despite the result, I’m glad I saw it. Whatever Bay’s faults, and there are many, he loves what he does. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, he got antsy and wanted to get out there and make something. While his Hollywood brethren are trolling social media and putting their political illiteracy on full display, Bay just wants to roll up his sleeves and make something entertaining. He can keep on doing it, just as long as he never sits in the director’s seat for the Transformers franchise ever again.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Will Sharp, a Marine veteran who has fallen on hard times since his discharge. His wife is sick and requires surgery. Exhausted of options, Will visits his adopted brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), a career bank robber. Will asks him for a loan, but Danny needs someone for his latest heist and twists Will’s arm to go along. If successful, the heist will net millions. Danny and his crew target a downtown Los Angeles bank, and everything goes well at first. Unfortunately, lovestruck police officer Zach (Jackson White) chooses this time to ask a teller on a date. He walks into the bank in the middle of the robbery, which sets the day’s events into motion. After a brief shootout and attempt to escape, everyone in Danny’s crew is killed, except for Danny and Will. The two commandeer an ambulance carrying away Officer Zach, who was shot in the abdomen, and abduct E.M.T. Cam (Eiza González) in the process. The stage is set. With Will driving and Danny completely off his rocker, Cam desperately tries to save Zach’s life while cops chase the ambulance all over the city.

There are lots of other characters in play in different parts of the city, and Bay cuts to all of them breathlessly, but we never lose track of where we are and what everyone’s role is. When Cam has to perform surgery to remove the bullet, she calls an old physician boyfriend (who then calls two other colleagues) to guide her through the process using conference calling and a laptop camera. Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) leads the operation to chase the ambulance and take out the robbers using whatever means necessary. Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell) is an F.B.I. agent and childhood friend of Danny. He understands how the man thinks and reveals that Danny has successfully robbed dozens of financial institutions. He realizes that Will isn’t a bad guy and instructs Cam to talk sense to him to bring the chase to an end. Meanwhile, Danny contacts Papi (A Martinez), a friend of his father, to stage a distraction that will allow the ambulance to get away.

The movie runs on adrenaline for nearly the entire show. It lacks the epic scale of Mad Max: Fury Road, but given the constraints of the busy Los Angeles streets, Bay did a masterful job using every tool at his disposal to capture the chaotic environment surrounding this chase. The freeways, streets, canals and structures of the city are potential hazards. A wrong-way freeway chase recalls an earlier such scene from 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A., but Bay manages to make it his own rather than risk being called an imitator. The camera flies around, swoops in, backs away and goes in for another round. With all that going on outside the ambulance, let’s not forget the inside. Jake Gyllenhaal’s turn as Danny Sharp is nuts, like a loose cannon shot out of another cannon. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp is calm and passionate. He conveys his character’s hesitation and surrender to his role in the bank heist convincingly. Eiza González is terrific as the E.M.T. She did her homework after she won the role, and her scenes providing first aid to Zach has all gravitas of the real thing.

While Ambulance gets a lot right with the action, it stumbles with its lame attempts at humor. Transformers featured a preposterous scene with Bernie Mac shouting “mammy.” Michael Bay gives us its equivalent here, with the homosexual Anson Clark and his partner attending couples therapy before he’s called into action. It’s played for laughs, but it elicits eye rolls instead. Law enforcement personnel get feisty with each other too often, another Bay trademark. It’s easy to sweep these aside here, because the dynamics inside the ambulance are so good, and the action is even better. The director isn’t changing who he is anytime soon, but the occasional success in his largely mediocre repertoire makes his continued employment worth it.

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