Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ambulance’ on VOD, a 136-Minute Car Chase That’s a Classic Michael Bay Skullcrusher

Now on VOD, Ambulance could very easily be retitled Michael Bay’s Fury Road, and yes, that’s probably a bit of throwup rising in the back of your throat. Further proof that the world has gone utterly mad is the zeitgeist’s warmish embrace of neo-Bayhem, as I personally know some people who thumbs-upped his previous movie, 2019 Netflix smashorama 6 Underground, and I now eyeball Ambulance’s current 69 (nice) percent fresh Tomatometer rating with furrowed brow. Hell may be here, my friends. Or perhaps some have been swayed by the pre-release chatter about how this is Bay’s “return to form,” and a “small” movie that only cost $40 million, and it played in theaters despite the ever-growing domination of franchise fodder, and therefore it MUST be here to restore the art of cinema to its truest, purest state: You know, SAVE US FROM DISNEY/MARVEL, O MICHAEL BAY. This, of course, is relativism at its most poisonously preposterous: I’d like to remind y’all that a good Michael Bay movie by any other standard is still pretty terrible!

AMBULANCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: SLOW MOTION HALCYON DAYS: Two boys play together some years ago. They’re all growed up now though: Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a former Marine and family man with the usual movie-military-vet sob story, you know, hard up for work, married, baby, wife needs an expensive operation, pill bottles, bills piling up. His adoptive brother is Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal), a career sociopathic bankrobber like his father before him. Obviously, Will took the more virtuous path out of a life of trouble and crime, and is now paying for it by being ground under America’s boot: he sacrificed his mental health to serve his country and now that very same country and its awful, awful health care system is grinding him under its boot. Implication being, this is what you get for being good, and that very disenfranchisement is why Will allows Danny to talk him into carrying a machine gun into a bank for a $32 million score, although I’m definitely reading more into this story than is necessary, because Bay’s intention here is not to offer social commentary, but rather, to destroy large swaths of Los Angeles with a 136-minute car chase.

Well, not quite 136-minute, because there’s more plot setup that needs to happen before half the city is covered with tire tracks and the glass-and-gnarled-metal detritus of countless wrecks. There are two parallel partnerships here: Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) is the hardened veteran EMT, and Scott (Colin Woodell) is her ambulance driver. (Is it his first day on the job? You bet your ass it is!) They save an impaled little girl (there’s Bay, ever an arbiter of good taste) and then she’s like, whatever, let’s get some enchiladas. And then we meet a coupla cops, Mark (Cedric Sanders) and his partner Zach (Jackson White), and there’s so little crime in L.A. on this day, the former brings the latter to the bank so he can ask out the teller he has a crush on. (Is Zach a rookie cop who’s so green he’s barely shot anyone on the job yet? You’re damn skippy he is!)

Of course, these three “character” plots are on a collision course that’s about to explode with narrative fireballs, so to speak, because the bank with the cute teller is the very same one that Will and Danny and their expendable goon squad are robbing the hell out of at this very minute. It is inevitable that Zach will be critically injured by bullets and wind up in the back of the ambulance that Danny and Will hijack, tearing ass through the city with many modern L.A. Roscoe P. Coltranes smashing up cruiser after cruiser in pursuit, maiming countless innocent commuters along the way, jamming up every ER in the tri-county area and causing countless harrowing insurance company claims for anyone who actually survives the relentless melee. Cam will of course perform surgery on Zach while Will Mariio Andrettis the ambulance at 85 mph through alleyways, freeways and T2 viaducts and Gyllenhaal’s eyes bulge out of his skull all Looney Tunes-like. How will this all end, you might ask? NO SPOILERS, but if it doesn’t happen in slow-mo, we’re gonna feel pretty ripped off.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Speed and Bay’s own Bad Boys come to mind. And if you managed to swallow the rising bile of the Fury Road comparison, Bay’s aping of Michael Mann’s masterful downtown-L.A. heist/shootout sequence in Heat will have you chundering in your bag of microwave Pop Secret.

Performance Worth Watching: Gyllenhaal quite entertainingly lets ’er rip as the movie’s detestable villain – and to be fair, there is a layer of complication to his character, who may have an inner conflict brewing beneath his sociopathy, tied to his affection for his long-suffering brother.

Memorable Dialogue: Two instances of the dialogue revealing Bay’s M.O.:

Cam on the way to rescue the (urgh) impaled child: “FLOOR IT!”

A random crook on the way to the bank heist: “PULL YOUR BALLS OUT, WE’RE GOIN’ TO WAR, BABY!”

Sex and Skin: None, and Bay shows signs of progress by not indulging his usual signature ogle-cam low-angle shots on short-skirted women. Baby steps!

Our Take: Bay, former Britny Fox music video and Playboy softcore reel director-turned-Hollywood’s most-hated maximalist, really delivers the stoopid this time around: A merciless and annoying BANTERPALOOZA ’22 script awash with self-commentary word-dreck like “This shit is crazy!” and “It’s a very expensive car chase right now.” Irritating characters that are either grating sandpaper personalities or empty vessels for simplistic emotions; you’ll hate ’em either way, and barely care who lives and dies. A Gyllenhaal performance that’s one big throbbing forehead vein a millimeter away bursting. An unmitigated-nonsense plot awash with moronic cliches and phony sentiment. A dizzying and assaultive blitzkrieg of edits. So much LENS FLARE you’ll be seeing it every time you close your eyes for the next several weeks. And a true-to-form, thoroughly Bay-like insistence upon bloat, as this thing starts to make us feel run the f— over at the 90-minute mark, and we whimper at the thought of 40-plus more minutes of this lunacy. This is Bayhem to the core, and I will reiterate my previously implied assertions in the plainest language possible: Bayhem sucks.

Admittedly, Ambulance isn’t all horrible. Hooray for Bay for using a vast majority of practical effects, even if they’re splintered into a million shards in the editing room. Intrepid character actor Garret Dillahunt is moderately amusing as the FBI guy in charge, the movie’s foxhouse-henhouse-outhouse Tommy Lee Jones-in-The Fugitive role. And as far as Bay-style glorifications of violence go, it’s not as gross as Pain and Gain, 6 Underground and his Transformers trash, although it does ripple with his trademark aesthetic tastelessness. There are moments when Ambulance threatens to endear itself to us with its relentless velocity and unapologetic OTT asininity (e.g., the MULTIPLE instances of smashed fruit carts and flower stands), it sideswipes us with a typically obnoxious reminder that we’re watching a Michael Bay movie.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Just watch the car chase in The Batman 27 times instead.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.