Ambulance (2022 | USA | 136 minutes | Michael Bay)
Michael Bay’s new movie opens with a scene that now seems ubiquitous and cliche: the American healthcare horror story. Will (Yahya Abdul-Matten II), a retired war hero, is on the phone desperate to get someone from the VA to approve an experimental surgery for his very sick wife. The bureaucracy is heartless, accentuated by how their names are numbers. “You’re number 12? I just talked to numbers 11 and 13.” I wouldn’t mind the American healthcare horror stories if they didn’t feel so toothless and impotent towards any meaningful change and just now feel emotionally manipulative.
Anyway, my point is that Michael Bay doesn’t have time for subtlety. Never has, never will.
To move the story along, Will promises his wife he’s going to a job interview and he is very much not going to see his master criminal brother by adoption Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). Oh but he is.
Danny says he doesn’t have the few hundred thousand dollars Will needs on him but he is on his way to execute an extensively planned bank heist at the same time Will visits and happens to need an extra person. He’s initially very much against it, until Danny asks “pretty please?” Moments later, they’re in a moving van in downtown Los Angeles attempting to rob the bank that is holding $32,000,000.
But things go sideways fast. The plan is foiled by a cop, not by any law enforcement intelligence but because he psyches himself up to ask out a bank teller he finds attractive at the same time the bank is being robbed. He won’t take no for an answer. Not from the cute teller whose agency he surely respects but from Danny pretending to be the bank manager who reluctantly lets him into the bank so he can act out the rom-com fantasy he has had in his head for God-only-knows how long.
The plan turns to hell and Will and Danny’s band of fuckup bank robbers (including a stoner who wears Birkenstocks to a heist and an Aryan-looking dude they call Mel Gibson) are all on their own. Will and Danny are together when Will accidentally/on purpose shoots the cop whose crush foiled the plan and they hijack the ambulance that is supposed to transport the wounded cop to a hospital. On board is also a plucky paramedic (Eiza Gonzalez) who is said to be the best EMT in Los Angeles but no one wants to be her partner because she can be seen by her coworkers as caustic on good days and abrasive on bad ones.
When this plot is established, though, there’s no rest until the credits appear on screen. Michael Bay’s greatest skill as a filmmaker is the ability to make it look really cool when shit blows up and he very much delivers here. The movie is full of non-stop action and propelled by adrenaline (there’s your pull-quote).
That’s all there is to it, but it’s a lot. I’m not exaggerating when I saw that it was about 90 straight minutes of pure intensity. That’s longer than the entire running time of the Danish film this movie remakes. The plot didn’t make much sense and relied on a lot of impossible feats that fell perfectly in line. But I didn’t care because I let the movie’s adrenaline take over. When the movie was over, I felt like I needed a nap.
At heart, I’m a simple man with simple needs and Ambulance delivered more than what I was hoping for. To quote all of the monster truck ads I saw on television as a ute, “Fourteen dollars will get you an entire seat, but you’ll only need the edge!”
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Ambulance is now playing in theaters.