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One does not hire Michael Bay for subtle adult drama. The blockbuster producer/director of the “ Transformers ” and “Bad Boys” franchises does have a distinctive style—it’s just that all of his authorial signatures involve massive explosions and dizzying drone shots. And Bay’s latest, “Ambulance,” is a thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast. 

“Ambulance” is a remake of the 2005 Danish film “Ambulancen,” with a few key differences. Both are about brothers who turn to bank robbery to pay for a relative’s medical bills. But here, the recipient is changed from a dying mother to a sick wife, juicing the conflict between career criminal Danny Sharp ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) and his adopted sibling, struggling veteran Will ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ). Bay’s world is one of good guys with principles and bad guys without, even when those principles cease to make any logical sense. But it’s not about making sense. It's about big, thunderous emotions. 

In both films, the ensuing heist goes horribly wrong, forcing the duo to hijack an ambulance as a combination getaway vehicle/camouflage so they can escape the police cruisers and SWAT vehicles and surveillance trucks surrounding the bank. But in Bay’s version, the poor sap dying in the back of the stolen ambulance isn’t an everyday heart patient, but a wounded cop. (What, you didn’t think badge worship would factor into this story?) And while “Ambulancen” runs a tight 80 minutes, “Ambulance” stretches its legs at a leisurely 136. 

That’s not to imply that there’s anything relaxing about watching “Ambulance.” The film opens on an emotionally manipulative register, panning over medical bills and pill bottles bathed in the same golden light that surrounds Will’s saintly wife Amy ( Moses Ingram ) as she cradles their newborn child. Amy’s cancer diagnosis has pushed the couple’s finances to their limit. And so Will reluctantly reconnects with his flashy, glib brother, with the intent of borrowing money to pay for Amy’s upcoming surgery. But Danny—who Gyllenhaal plays like the character has Red Bull and cocaine for breakfast every morning—offers him one better: Rather than a few hundred thousand dollars to appease the insurance companies, how about a payday of $8 million? 

That’s the botched robbery mentioned above, which plays out like “Heat” on steroids following the introduction of the film’s third lead, Cam Thompson ( Eiza González ). In typical action-movie character style, Cam is the best damn EMT the city of Los Angeles has ever seen—able, as she puts it, “to keep anyone alive for 20 minutes.” She’s also (surprise, surprise) cynical and hardened, snapping at her newest partner that it’s just a job and she doesn’t care what happens to the little girl she just rescued from a bloody car crash where the child was impaled on a piece of wrought-iron fencing. 

Will Cam’s hostage experience—she’s the EMT in Danny and Will’s stolen ambulance, if you haven’t yet put that together—reignite her passion for saving lives? Who’s to say? What can be said is that once the ambulance takes off on a “ Speed ”-esque chase through the streets of a curiously traffic-free Los Angeles, the stakes escalate until Cam is wrist-deep in the cop’s open chest cavity, performing a life-saving procedure with the help of two trauma surgeons who FaceTime in from a golf course. Blood is spurting from the cop’s wound in squishy geysers. Danny is behind the wheel, mowing down traffic cones and speeding the wrong way up highway overpasses at 60 mph. Will is attached to the body on the stretcher, serving as a human blood bag like in “ Mad Max: Fury Road .” An FBI hostage negotiator is on the phone, demanding to know what the hell is going on. Everyone is screaming. And then Cam’s laptop goes dead. She’s got to finish this surgery on her own—and the cop’s spleen just burst.

In short, “Ambulance” is all peak and no valley, a breathless roller coaster ride that’s made all the more discombobulating by Bay’s hyper-kinetic shooting style. In early dialogue scenes, the camera pivots around the characters in dramatic low-angle shots. And once the action gets going, the combination of volatile drone photography—one of Bay and cinematographer Roberto De Angelis ’ favorites is to zip up the side of a DTLA skyscraper, then plunge back towards the concrete with nauseating speed—and frenetic editing makes it difficult to tell at times who’s chasing whom and in what direction. And the flaming cop cars flying in all directions, including directly towards the camera, don’t help the legibility issue.

The thing about roller coasters is, though, that they’re a lot of fun. And if you surrender to the chaos and allow your brain cells to scatter like so much fruit sent whizzing through the air as the titular vehicle crashes through an LA street market, “Ambulance” is a blast—a disorienting, overly long blast, but a blast nonetheless. Bay seems to be having fun, too: he stuffs the film with as many comic relief moments as he does everything else, casts his own dog in an absurd cameo role, and allows multiple references to earlier Bay films from screenwriter Chris Fedak to make it onto the screen intact. The movie looks like it cost more than its $40 million budget, thanks to the sheer volume of flaming destruction on screen. And as far as Bay’s concerned, that means he held up his end of the bargain. 

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Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of  The A.V. Club  from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like  Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and  RogerEbert.com.

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Film credits.

Ambulance (2022)

136 minutes

Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp

Eiza González as Cam Thompson

Garret Dillahunt as Captain Monroe

Keir O'Donnell as FBI Agent Anson Clark

Moses Ingram as Amy Sharp

A Martinez as Papi

• Michael Bay
• Chris Fedak
• Pietro Scalia

Original Music Composer

• Lorne Balfe

Director of Photography

• Roberto De Angelis

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‘Ambulance’ Review: Michael Bay Is Our Emergency Movie Technician

The action auteur’s latest opus stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as bank robbers who commandeer an unlikely getaway vehicle.

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By A.O. Scott

I wish someone had come with me to the screening of “Ambulance,” so I could have leaned over at a key point early in the story and whispered, “That must be the ambulance.” It’s great when movies make you feel smart.

Not that anyone necessarily goes to Michael Bay movies for that reason. And “Ambulance,” which includes verbal shout-outs to “Bad Boys” and “The Rock,” is something of a return to form for this auteur of vehicular mayhem and muscular bombast. A relatively low-budget project, especially when compared with the “Transformers” franchise he started, it bundles explosive set pieces into a plot that would be preposterous if you stopped to think about it.

The whole idea is that you won’t. Bay’s virtuosic flouting of the laws of physics, probability and narrative coherence is meant to catapult you into a zone of sublimity where melodramatic emotion and adrenalized excitement fuse into a whole new kind of sensation. Big, operatic feelings — mostly having to do with loyalty, honor and professionalism — are both heightened and lightened by propulsive speed and overscaled action. You’re not required to believe any of it, but somehow the word that comes to mind when I reflect on the 136 minutes I spent pinned to my seat watching this thing is “persuasive.”

That’s partly because “Ambulance,” built on the chassis of a 2005 Danish movie of the same name, is advancing an argument, or maybe a meta-argument, about the current state and aesthetic raison d’être of cinema.

Some of the salient points are made through dialogue (the script is by Chris Fedak), in a series of offhand jokes about the current state of pop-cultural literacy. At one point the criminal mastermind (Jake Gyllenhaal) refers to one of his minions as “Mel Gibson,” insisting on a resemblance that isn’t really there and invoking “Braveheart.” He seems to think that movie won “a bunch of Grammys.”

Later, a reference to “The Rock,” the Michael Bay movie, will be mistaken for a reference to the Rock, the wrestler and actor (also known as Dwayne Johnson) who appeared in “Pain & Gain,” a different Michael Bay movie. A graybeard Los Angeles police captain (Garret Dillahunt) will call a younger F.B.I. agent (Keir O’Donnell) “Doogie Howser.” “I’m sorry, boomer, but I don’t know who that is,” the whippersnapper retorts.

OK, that one is not really about cinema per se, but to me these odd little notes signal that Bay, born on the cusp between the baby boom and Generation X, has traded in his enfant terrible status for membership in the old guard. A glorious heritage is slipping away before our eyes. Action is required!

Ergo “Ambulance,” which takes place in a single hectic day in Los Angeles and is defiantly the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make anymore. It isn’t driven by the brand requirements of a lucrative intellectual property, and it isn’t something you could just as well watch at home.

Before the major chasing and shooting gets underway, the titular vehicle and its heroic E.M.T., Cam Thompson (Eiza González), attend to a young car-accident victim who has been impaled on a piece of wrought-iron fence. This kind of mishap is a staple of shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “9-1-1,” and “Ambulance” can be seen as a sustained critique of television’s domesticated presentation of disaster. Cam saves the child in the morning and by the time rush hour rolls around is performing emergency abdominal surgery in the middle of a car chase while conferring with trauma surgeons via video chat. Exploding cars and an exploding spleen, cut together in perfect counterpoint: that’s cinema, kids.

So are the wild vertical drone shots in which the camera rockets skyward before plunging back to earth, a carnival-ride move that Bay adds to his repertoire of swooping, ricocheting, vertiginous effects. And so, finally, is the story, an old-fashioned concatenation of coincidences, collisions and foolproof plans gone horribly awry.

At the center is a daylight robbery that plucks $32 million from a bank — a modest haul compared with the $100 million Ed Harris was after in “The Rock” back in 1996, especially when you adjust for inflation. The main robbers are Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who grew up as brothers, raised by a criminal father. Flashbacks show their boyhood selves at play, but as grown-ups they have taken diverging paths. Danny followed in Dad’s footsteps, while Will joined the Marines. Now married (to Moses Ingram) with an infant son, he’s desperate for money to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment. Stopping by Danny’s place of business to ask for a loan, he ends up signing on with Danny’s crew.

Eventually they are joined by two hostages: Cam and a rookie cop named Zach (Jackson White), whose partner, Mark (Cedric Sanders), becomes part of an elaborate tour of the freeways and alleys of Los Angeles that also involves a lot of other people on both sides of the law. It all ends up pretty much where you expect it will, but the actors do a good job of seething and emoting under pressure, and Gyllenhaal does a volatile, charming sociopath thing that isn’t as annoying as it might be.

So after much deliberation, my critical verdict on “Ambulance” is: It’s a movie!

Ambulance Rated R. F-bombs, exploding cars, a ruptured spleen. Running time: 2 hour 16 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the actor who played one of the villains in “The Rock.” It was Ed Harris not Sean Connery.

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A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Metacritic reviews

• 80 The Telegraph Robbie Collin The Telegraph Robbie Collin Speeding vehicles are clunked and donked into one another with xylophonic zeal, while the camera snakes and tears between them faster than seems physically possible. I mean it as a compliment when I say there are entire sequences here which look as if they might have been shot by a monkey in a jetpack.
• 80 Little White Lies Kambole Campbell Little White Lies Kambole Campbell Ambulance is just delightfully unhinged in its experiment to see how much carnage can be caused by just one car chase.
• 70 Screen Daily Tim Grierson Screen Daily Tim Grierson For all its showy excesses, sophomoric humour and strained gravitas, Ambulance is often riveting, the film speeding along as recklessly as that ambulance. This popcorn thriller certainly is not brainy, but its escapism has a muscular precision.
• 60 Empire John Nugent Empire John Nugent Michael Bay’s tribute to the emergency services (which involves blowing several of them up) is noisy, messy and frequently absurd — yet still somehow his most gleefully entertaining effort in at least a decade.
• 60 The Independent Clarisse Loughrey The Independent Clarisse Loughrey Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.
• 40 The Guardian Peter Bradshaw The Guardian Peter Bradshaw For all the spectacular action set pieces, there’s something silly and tedious that sets in well before the two-hour mark. It flatlines.
• 30 TheWrap Robert Abele TheWrap Robert Abele Even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this shoulda-been auto-pocalypse from being in any way pleasurable.
• 30 The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck At a lean, mean 90 minutes or so, Ambulance might have been a guilty pleasure. Instead, it’s the sort of cinematic thrill ride so overstuffed that you can’t wait for it to be over.
• 30 Variety Owen Gleiberman Variety Owen Gleiberman Ambulance is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.
• 25 IndieWire Carlos Aguilar IndieWire Carlos Aguilar Bay’s latest reeks of falsehood veiled as righteousness.
• See all 55 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for Ambulance

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‘Ambulance’ Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in Michael Bay’s Retro Excessive ‘Die Hard’ on an EMS Van

It takes you back to an age when action thrillers were big, loud, decadent, “rebellious,” and ripped off from "Die Hard." But this one, in its violent throttling way, is joyless.

By Owen Gleiberman

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Set during one long day in Los Angeles, it’s the tale of a bank robbery gone spectacularly wrong. And what it all comes down to is this: Following a street showdown that tries to out-machine-gun clatter the one in Michael Mann’s “Heat,” two of the robbers hijack an ambulance, with a paramedic and a wounded cop aboard, and they then race through the streets of L.A. pursued by an army of squad cars, police choppers, and news teams. It’s “Speed” crossed with the O.J. Bronco chase crossed with “Die Hard” on an EMS van, and it’s all served up in a pedal-to-the-metal mode of overwrought hyper intensity one could describe as Bay to the Max.

In “Ambulance,” there’s no such thing as an establishing shot of a vehicle cruising along a freeway that isn’t immediately followed by an off-angle, camera-whooshing-through-the-air operatic heightening of that shot. The camera doesn’t just move, it throttles — gliding, plunging and rocketing forward, traveling through tunnels and bending around corners. And the film’s editing revives the old cut-cut-cut machismo of here’s-what-a-former-music-video-director-is-made-of. It’s action montage on Adderall. It’s all supposed to be relentlessly jacked, but too often the folly of the Bay style is that it trowels on aggressive techno filmmaking energy like frosting, substituting it for a situation that’s actually authentically suspenseful.

Does Danny have an ingenious plan to pull off a heist of $32 million? Amazingly, no. He’s got a crew of gnarly henchmen, including one they call “Mel Gibson” (because he looks nearly as scary), but after making the tellers get on the floor, the men walk around without masks, as if no one would be able to identify them. When a naïve rookie cop, Officer Zach (Jackson White), asks to come into the bank because he wants to flirt with one of the tellers, it’s only a matter of time before their cover is blown.

The slovenly lack of design — not just in the robbery but in Chris Fedak’s script, which is longer on late-’80s/’90s attitude (“These sons of bitches are about to have a really bad day!” ) than it is on logic — gives the audience a curious relationship to Danny and his crew. Do we want to see these jokers succeed? Even as movie criminals, they don’t do a lot to earn our affection or respect, and from the start it’s clear that they have almost no chance. (Are they going to escape the entire LAPD in a hard-charging ambulance?) But if not, then what are we spending this 136-minute movie rooting for? Abdul-Mateen’s Will, the noble straight shooter, is our entry point into the film, but for a long time Gyllenhaal, in jabbering-psycho-lite mode, dominates the proceedings, and the character’s scurrilous abrasiveness is more wearying than charismatic.

Danny and Will aren’t biological brothers — Will was taken in by Danny’s father and raised as his sibling. But that father, we learn, was himself an infamous criminal; the whole family-background thing is a little abstract and a touch ludicrous. Chris Fedak has obviously studied the if-it-feels-good-f—k-it screenwriting method of early Shane Black, and he comes up with at least one scene that’s too nuts for words: Cam (Eiza González), the spitfire paramedic hostage, gets on the cell phone with her surgeon ex-boyfriend to guide her through an impromptu operation, with no anaesthetic, on Zach, who has a bullet in his spleen, which bursts right in front of us. At this point you may seriously wonder if you’re having fun yet.

The ’90s school of overripe action excess (Bay! Willis! “Con Air”!) produced a few classic movies, like the transcendently gonzo-yet-plausible-at-every-moment “Speed,” but mostly it was about turning off your brain and turning up the volume. There’s a place for that, and I’ll confess that as a critic I was too harsh at the time about a poker-faced preposterous intergalactic ballistic romp like “Armageddon.” Yet “Ambulance” is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, March 23, 2022. MPAA rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release, in association with Endeavor Content, of a Bay Films, New Republic Pictures, Project X Entertainment production. Producers: Michael Bay, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Ian Bryce. Executive producers: Michael Kase, Mark Moran.
• Crew: Director: Michael Bay. Screenplay: Chris Fedak. Camera: Roberto De Angelis. Editor: Pietro Scalia. Music: Lorne Balfe.
• With: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza Gonzalez, Moses Ingram, Jackson White, Cedric Sanders, Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, A Martinez.

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Ambulance Review

A loud, brash, over-the-top action flick like only michael bay can deliver..

Ambulance will debut in U.S. theaters on April 8, 2022.

Action movies don’t have to be big, bold, brash displays of guns, violence, and car chases. Some take an altogether more measured approach, layering plot and dialogue to underpin a thrilling story, using action sequences to punctuate a gripping story.

Ambulance does absolutely none of that.

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Michael Bay has directed possibly the most Michael Bay film of all time as Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stomp around Los Angeles in a stolen ambulance, evading the police after a heist gone wrong.

It’s a neat setup that borrows a lot from the likes of Speed and the Grand Theft Auto games, with frenzied editing that makes scenes whizz by faster than a getaway ambulance. There’s nothing subtle or understated here – Ambulance is a bold movie from a director renowned for his over-the-top antics. And boy, Bay does not disappoint here.

What's Michael Bay's best movie?

Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Abdul-Mateen) are crooks pulling one last big bank job – the one to top them all. But while Danny is keen to follow in his criminal father’s footsteps, Will is a more reluctant bank robber, dragged kicking and screaming into his brother’s scheme.

The heist scenes are a bit rough around the edges, but that’s kind of the point. It all goes sideways very quickly, leaving Danny and Will hot-footing it out of there with bags stuffed full of cash and assault rifles at the ready. Not exactly inconspicuous, and with the cops on their tail, time is running out. If only they could find a way out…

Enter the Ambulance, home to notorious EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González), who can keep anyone alive for 20 minutes as long as you don’t dare to strike up any kind of personal conversation. She’s essentially a caricature of a grizzled veteran health care worker, but González manages to wrestle with the stereotype to pull out an impressive performance.

Of course, the real star of the show is Gyllenhaal, who spends 136 minutes chewing the scenery so hard, he needs a new set of dentures by the end of it. Expect crazed monologues, hyped-up displays of aggression, and bucketloads of those trademark Gyllenhaal crazed expressions. Abdul-Mateen brings a more measured performance as the humble U.S. veteran who just happens to be related to a serial bank robber. Although he’s underutilized at first, Abdul-Mateen really comes into his own by the third act, building a solid rapport with Gyllenhaal that eventually bursts out of the screen.

But Cam gets plenty of opportunity to shine too. Although the high-speed hijinks of a bank robbery gone wrong provide most of the action, it’s punctuated by excruciating medical scenes which see Cam go beyond the call of duty.

In fact, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.

Shot during lockdown in 2021, Ambulance feels like a salute to the frontline healthcare workers who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. Positioning Cam as the trustworthy face of a brutal healthcare system shows us the humanity and sacrifice of the noble EMT, highlighting the bravery of the ordinary nurse or hospital porter.

That being said, it’s not particularly realistic.

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After all, one scene sees the EMT perform impromptu surgery using a hair clip while being walked through the procedure by a surgeon friend over Zoom. But González’s no-nonsense heroine is unwavering in the face of danger. She’s not particularly complex – neither are Gyllenhaal and Abdul Mateen’s characters. But there’s joy to be found in the simple plot, executed amid a hail of gunfire, in the back of a speeding ambulance, with Bay’s signature explosions wreaking havoc around them.

It's an audacious film in more ways than one. Only Bay can get away with directly referencing his own movies throughout the film’s already cheesy dialogue. The tongue-in-cheek nature of a cop talking about Bad Boys is more than a little reminiscent of Hot Fuzz .

Pop quiz, hotshot – how exactly does Michael Bay do it?

That’s all down to his signature style. It's a fast-paced thrill ride all round with breakneck cuts and a frantic energy you won’t find anywhere else. Sure, it’s a bit exhausting to sit through over two hours of edge-of-your-seat action and not-quite-whip-smart quips from Gyllenhaal’s cash-obsessed hustler. But you’re rewarded with an action-packed finale that will leave you feeling positively energized.

Ambulance is a high-octane delight for anyone who loves the complete and utter mayhem of an over-the-top action thriller. It’s not particularly clever, or original. But Ambulance does deliver the kind of thrilling, fast-paced action that’s been missing in cinemas for the last few years. It’s perfect popcorn fodder with a healthy dose of explosions, chase scenes, and that signature fast-cutting, frenzied style that made Bay a household name.

Don’t expect too much and Ambulance will give you a healthy shot of adrenaline long before you risk flatlining.

Ambulance is a big, loud action flick that stomps its way through downtown Los Angeles and leaves you wondering what the hell you just witnessed. It’s Dog Day Afternoon meets Speed with all the explosions and car chases you should expect from a Michael Bay movie. Subtlety is off the table when it comes to Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance, who clearly has a blast with his over-the-top scene-chewing, while Yahya Abdul-Mateen II adds a touch of heart to it all. Ambulance is crazy, dumb fun with a plot that often makes no sense whatsoever. But does it really have to? Not if you’re Michael Bay.

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Ambulance review: Michael Bay goes full-crazy in a wildly adrenalized action throwback

Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II take the wheel in the director's berserk but frequently entertaining L.A. heist thriller.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Early on in Ambulance , a minor character, a cop, starts riffing on an old Sean Connery quote from the 1996 action thriller The Rock . "You know, The Rock ?" he prods his partner, a rookie just out of the academy. "Yeah, he was a wrestler," the partner replies happily, "Then he became an actor." Of course this kid doesn't know that it's the name of a Michael Bay movie, why would he? He probably wasn't born yet.

He also probably wouldn't know how very Bay Ambulance (in theaters Friday) is: way Bay, peak bay, Bay über alles. That is to say, at one point someone will squeeze a human spleen until it bursts, and someone else, two people actually, will sing Christopher Cross's yacht-rock apotheosis "Sailing" during a high-speed police chase in off-key harmony. Many day-rate extras will die anonymous explosive deaths, but the hero will survive bombs, bazookas, and a tank. And all will follow the first law of the Bay Cinematic Universe: If a thing can go boom, it will go boom.

Ambulance is also, it turns out, better than most of the movies in Bay's catalog, though the bar for Armageddon , Pearl Harbor , and five Transformers arguably has only itself to clear. Better in that it immediately sets the dial at 11, action-wise, and stays there, constantly defibrillating, for the next 130-plus minutes. And better in that its leads are played by two actors who work far more than they probably need to to sell this particular brand of rococo madness. Jake Gyllenhaal is Danny Sharp, a maniacally cheerful freelance bandit; Yahya Abdul Mateen II ( Candyman , The Matrix Resurrections ) is his adopted brother Will, a former marine with a wife and new baby. (Their late father, it is mentioned several times, was a criminal and a "total psycho"; how he ended up taking in Will remains a mystery, but we're not here to sweat the details.)

Though the brothers are semi-estranged and seemingly live in different worlds, Bay and screenwriter Chris Fedak ( Prodigal Son , DC's Legends of Tomorrow ) dispense breezily with Will's motivation in the first scene: He's a veteran, broke and unsupported by the country he served, and his wife needs experimental surgery they can't afford. So hey, phone a friend! Conveniently, Danny has a job planned for that very afternoon, a $32 million drop in downtown Los Angeles. Never mind that his crew is so casually ill-prepared for a heist that one shaggy Z-boy arrives in open-toed sandals ("Who wears Birkenstocks to a bank robbery, Trent?").

When things go awry, as they do, Will and Danny are forced to flee the scene in an ambulance with a critically injured cop (Jackson White) and an EMT named Cam ( I Care a Lot 's Eiza González) on board, and the entire air, land, and sea fleet of the LAPD in hot pursuit. There's an ornery police captain (Garret Dillahunt, who looks very much like Josh Duhamel but isn't), his impatient lieutenant (Olivia Stambouliah), and an FBI agent (Keir O'Donnell) with the clearest read on Danny and a husband who just wants him to come home.

There's also some ambiguous business with a short-fused crime lord (A Martinez) everybody calls Papi, but the dramatic thrust of the movie mostly takes place behind the wheel, while the passengers bicker and bargain and attempt to perform several ill-advised emergency medical procedures. Bay shoots these scenes as if he's just been injected with several kinds of lightning, the camera swooping and corkscrewing at seasick angles over freeways and fireballs and blaring California sunshine. And Gyllenhaal, fully going for baroque, seems almost giddy, throwing off one liners like they're beads at Mardi Gras and making Nic Cage crazy eyes.

Gonzalez, infuriated and blood-spattered, gets more to do than the average decorative female in a film like this, somehow without losing her lip gloss, and Abdul-Mateen II imbues Will with far more pathos and humanity than his hasty sketch of a character deserves. It all goes on too long and eventually wears itself out (the 2005 Danish original on which the screenplay is based clocks in almost a full hour shorter). The violence is cartoonishly casual and the ending pure Hollywood corn. The absurdity, though, is the point: They're just two brothers on the run, and escape is what we came for. Grade: B

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‘Ambulance’ Review: Michael Bay’s Absurd Chase Film Is His Best in Decades

Bay scales back for a wild and crazy action film that is a hell of a ride.

“We don’t stop” almost becomes a mantra for Will Sharp ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) and his adopted brother, Danny ( Jake Gyllenhaal ), who have hijacked an ambulance after a bank robbery gone wrong. Not only has their attempt at a big score left a pile of bodies in its wake, but they’re driving around with a hostage EMT, Cam Thompson ( Eiza González ), who is trying to keep police officer Zack ( Jackson White ) alive, after Will shot him in their attempt to escape. To make matters worse, this ambulance is flying through the streets of Los Angeles, chased by cops and helicopters, and attempting to avoid pretty much any obstacle one can imagine. Will and Danny don’t stop because they can’t stop. Like a shark, if they stop, they know they’ll die.

Similarly, Michael Bay is also someone who at times doesn’t seem to know when to stop. While the beginning of Bay’s career was packed with over-the-top action films that were a joy to revel in, like Bad Boys , The Rock , and Armageddon , his work can often feel like a slog that doesn’t know when to quit. The last two decades of Bay's work have been packed with five different Transformers films, and while we occasionally got glimpses of the absurd fun that started Bay’s career with something like 2013’s Pain & Gain , Bay has mostly become known for his excess and exhaustion.

Yet with Ambulance —Bay’s fifteenth film and first theatrical release since 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight —Bay has tapped into that earlier version of himself, back when he could go big, ridiculous, and maintain a level of excitement and fun throughout an entire film. From the moment Ambulance gets going, it doesn’t stop, and for the first time in a long time, Bay makes this adventure compelling from beginning to end.

RELATED: 'Ambulance' Trailer Promises Pulse-Pounding Action From Michael Bay's Latest Movie

In Ambulance , Will Sharp is a veteran who needs $231,000 for his wife’s surgery. With his benefits falling short, Will talks to his brother Danny, who convinces him to help with a bank heist that will earn the entire crew $32 million. Of course, the robbery goes south, and as the only surviving members of their team, Will and Danny take control of an ambulance, complete with the aforementioned EMT and injured officer along for the ride. Trying to stop these two are Captain Monroe ( Garret Dillahunt ) and FBI Agent Anson Clark ( Kein O’Donnell ), along with what seems like the entire Los Angeles police department.

As one would expect from Bay, Ambulance is still packed with plenty of illogical moments that are as preposterous as they are laughable. Written by Chris Fedak ( Chuck , Prodigal Son ) and based on the 2005 Danish film of the same name, Ambulance embraces the inherent ludicrous nature of a Michael Bay film. For example, on their spree to safety, it doesn’t seem to matter than Will and Danny likely cause the death of dozens of police officers, only that they save the one they’re driving. Bay and Fedak pack Ambulance with outlandish surprises, character connections, and a truly unbelievable amount of close calls. But Ambulance is also a film that Bay and Fedak know people will either embrace for what it is, or completely disregard, and Ambulance rightfully decides to play to the audience that is ready to go along for this ride.

And what a ride this is. Bay’s camera also truly can’t stop, as drone shots fly around with almost no clear intent but to add to the insanity, and even the simplest shots are filmed in the most grandiose and extravagant ways possible. But again, Bay seems inspired by the simpler, more straightforward action that he started his career with. Ambulance even directly quotes The Rock and Bad Boys , as if Bay knows these are exactly the types of films audiences want from him as a director. Yet with Ambulance , Bay is borrowing heavily from Michael Mann ’s Heat , mixed with a copious amount of Jan de Bont ’s Speed . The result is unpredictable and always compelling, a film that would be insane for anyone else, but feels like Bay going back-to-basics for the first time in a while.

But elevating Ambulance are the three performances at the center of the film, all of whom manage to avoid feeling like typical Bay stock characters. Before the action begins, Bay takes the time to set up the hopelessness in Will’s financial struggle, as well as Cam’s compassion for her patients that only lasts until she gets them to the hospital. Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal’s Danny is more of an uncertainty, a criminal who clearly loves his brother, but his shady past shows that he will also do anything to survive. Both Abdul-Mateen II and González are solid in sympathetic roles, but it’s Gyllenhaal’s ability to match Bay’s craziness that makes him a fascinating antihero.

It’s rare to find a film as gleefully wild as Ambulance , a balls-to-the-wall, a frenetic film that doesn’t attempt to make sense of all its craziness, but simply surrenders to it. Over the decades, Bay has continuously increased the scale of his action spectacles, and in doing so, has lost what made him such an entertaining action director in his earlier films. By cutting back and simply sticking to the thrills and the madness of this situation and little else, Bay has made one of his best films in decades.

Ambulance comes to theaters on April 8.

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Ambulance Is the Kind of Thrill Ride Theaters Were Made For

Ambulance , the latest from director Michael Bay, is a film powered by the jittery force of will and blissful confidence that comes with doing cocaine. Lots of cocaine. If you told me that before every swooning shot setup or bombastic line reading from co-lead Jake Gyllenhaal, people on set dived into mountains of cocaine, I would thoroughly and utterly believe you. This is exactly the kind of ridiculousness I can get behind. It deserves far more love than it got at the box office its opening weekend for putting to the fore the pleasure principle too many filmmakers in Hollywood have cast aside for self-aware quips and broadly connected universes — though I do appreciate the Ambulance characters who quote and reference previous Bay powerhouses Bad Boys and The Rock , meaning Bay exists in the universe of his own film.

Ambulance has been dubbed “small” by Bay standards because of its mid- budget cost of $40 million. For reference, his previous Netflix film, 6 Underground, starring sentient ingrown hair Ryan Reynolds, cost $150 million. But don’t let that amount of money fool you into thinking Ambulance is anything less than a deliciously profane, bonkers thrill that puts audience gratification above things like common sense and characterization. This is a film built to satisfy — teasing laughter and shock out of you at a clip. The intensity starts early. Screenwriter Chris Fedak doesn’t waste time; he efficiently sets up the crime and the trio of stars powering the narrative, relying first on amber-hued childhood flashbacks accompanied by a treacly score, then by the charisma of Gyllenhaal (playing Danny Sharp) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (playing Will Sharp) as adoptive brothers on very different sides of the law who share a harrowing adolescence thanks to their bank-robbing psychopath of a father, in whose steps the former walks. Will is at the end of his line. A war veteran and dad himself, he is desperate to get the money necessary to help his wife, Amy (Moses Ingram), pay for an experimental treatment for her hazily defined health issues. He turns to his criminal brother for a job that quickly goes left.

What starts as a secure bank robbery quickly becomes a pulsating chase through the streets of Los Angeles with the tough-broad EMT Cam (Eiza González) trying to keep alive the admittedly annoying cop (Jackson White) whom Will shot in a fit of anxiety. The film builds its twists on moments of luck and ingenuity, roping in a dazzling array of characters — from the cartel members Danny relies on to evade the authorities to FBI agent Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell), whom Danny went to college with after his father urged him to take criminal-profiling classes in order to better understand the minds that would one day be eager to thwart him. Ambulance builds its emotional life on the ragged link between Danny and Will, juxtaposing their differences at every turn. Danny is beguiling with a hair-trigger temper. Will is stoic and caring, disposed to put his life on the line for his very own hostages.

The characterization doesn’t always sing, especially when you clock the discomfiting exaltation of the armed forces that anchors the story or the fact that the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen doesn’t always hit. When Cam is introduced, it becomes clear just what kind of female character we’re faced with. She’s an EMT who can lovingly aid a young girl with a fence spoke piercing her abdomen, as the groan of metal on metal fills the air, and then want to eat enchiladas in the next breath. She’s rough-hewn and no-nonsense in that effortlessly beautiful way expected of actresses of this range — relatively young, pretty in a way that seems algorithmically designed — who have yet to prove what they can do. Here, she’s gentle when she really needs to be steely. But at its best, Ambulance is brimming with a visual brio that infuses its car crashes, chases, and bevy of explosions with delight.

The continued diminishment of mid-budget films in Hollywood in recent decades is often lamented, particularly for how integral they can be to the development and refinement of a star’s image. But much more has been lost than that. Consider the wealth of character actors in films such as the raucous Keanu Reeves action flick Speed to erotic thrillers like The Last Seduction. Bay and casting director Denise Chamian understand how to build a supporting cast. The film is colored with a variety of excellent character actors with strong turnout, especially Garret Dillahunt as the cunning police captain Monroe and Olivia Stambouliah as the electric smart-mouth Lieutenant Dzaghig, whose line readings got an enthusiastic response from my theater’s audience. Coupled with the surprisingly high body count, Ambulance hits what it needs to hit: visceral thrills, copious amounts of blood and violence (without an overreliance on shoddy CGI), practical effects, and a sincere interest in putting its characters through absolute hell. So when a Birkenstock-wearing robber gets decimated, his legs run over, only for him to look down and ask what the hell happened with the sort of nonchalance of someone acknowledging the pickles were forgotten on their burger, you can’t help but giggle. But your eyes — and the camera, guided by kinetic cinematographer Roberto De Angelis — always fall back on Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen.

As Danny, Gyllenhaal is giving hypermasculine drag. This isn’t new for him. He’s an actor who truly loves to toggle between more experimental art-house fare and big-budget extravaganzas. He’s a wry, flexible performer I have sincerely enjoyed over the decades, but whenever he’s in action of this ilk, it’s as if he needs to desperately remind us he can be a man’s man, throwing off the more feminine or complex dynamics of films such as Wildlife and Enemy , which allow him to sit within a more pluripotent masculinity. Here, Gyllenhaal is going full masc. In his hands, Danny’s charms quickly curdle into selfishness and sharp-edged violence. Still, he’s funny as hell in the role — chewing apart sentences, spitting out one-liners, using his physicality to seduce people into a state of fear, moving with ecstatic grace. He’s giving pure, unabashed gonzo energy. When he says, “It’s not that simple, Will. We’re not the bad guys,” we’re meant to look at his character warily. Yet Bay doesn’t account for the fact that more than a few in the audience of this film (myself included) couldn’t give less of a damn about the cops. It’s the criminals we root for as they flout the system and put a middle finger in the air to propriety.

On the other hand, Abdul-Mateen has been saddled with a character built together with stoicism, a good heart, and the reverence Bay clearly holds for the armed forces. Casting Abdul-Mateen in the role brings to the fore a host of interlocking issues, namely the way Black folks are forced into systems that support the very fascism and imperialism that constrain their lives on the home front. Bay doesn’t wrestle with this dynamic. Hell, he doesn’t even realize it’s there. So when it becomes clear that Danny and Will’s fate is either death or prison, the political discomfort becomes glaring. Here is a Black man trying to aid his family after the government he’s upheld discarded him only to end up a part of an even more damning system that stains this country’s hands with the blood of untold Black and brown folks. Watching Abdul-Mateen — whether he’s belting out a song with Gyllenhaal to burn off some of their anxious trepidation or punching the hell out of his onscreen brother with the sort of aplomb that immediately piques the interest of the authorities nipping at their heels — I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly he wants from his career. In HBO’s resplendent series Watchmen , he plays Doctor Manhattan with a tender heart and prowess. In the silly bombast of Aquaman , he plays my perennial favorite, Black Manta, with sneering force. More recently in Matrix Resurrections , he takes a spin on Morpheus that is self-aware and brazenly confident. He’s an actor with supremely lupine physical ingenuity, the kind of performer who walks into the room and easily charms the eye. But what rooms does he desire to walk into? What heights does he want to reach? Despite his skill and profile, Abdul-Mateen isn’t consistently taking on roles that put his power in the spotlight.

But that’s not why you’re reading this review. You’re wondering, Is Ambulance the kind of fun worth trotting out to the theater for? Hell, yeah, it is. Where do I begin? With the ecstatic color palette? The glossy reverence for a car being flipped several times in the air as if dancing of its own accord? The sheer insanity of the crashes wrought with balletic grace? How about those drone shots? Bay relies on the vertiginous joy of overhead drone shots dangling on the precipice of skyscrapers and atop other squat buildings before swooping down and tracking an eye on the cataclysmic action happening below. This swooning visual style is used again and again to great effect. Another great example of the film’s visual force? When Danny screams that Will is in fact his real brother before they unleash a hail of bullets in slo-mo on a cartel boss and his underlings, spinning in a circle to pick off their rivals. What more can be said but this: Now that’s cinema, baby.

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Michael Bay defibrillates old-school action cinema with Ambulance

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“People still rob banks?” someone asks about halfway through Michael Bay’s heist-gone-wrong/car-chase thriller Ambulance . She might as well have asked, “People still make movies about people robbing banks?” Or, more to the point, “People still make movies like this about people robbing banks?” It’s a rare self-aware moment in an otherwise very un-self-conscious throwback: an action movie that could be straight out of the mid-’90s, but that most definitely is not being clever about it.

Ambulance belongs to a specific breed of action film that has been chased out of theaters over the last couple of decades by the fantastical, digital franchise blockbuster. It’s a one-shot idea that sets off a practical spectacle of car crashes, gun battles, stunts, and sweaty acting, orchestrated by a deranged ringmaster of a director who will stop at nothing to get the shot he has in mind. It’s stupid, exciting, unruly (with a 136-minute run time), and strangely refreshing.

The really strange thing is that this shock to the system for old-school action filmmaking comes from Bay, who has been a bête noir for film critics and cinephiles for the best part of two decades. This is the director whose taste for frenetic cutting and camerawork turned action movies into barely legible visual assaults. This is the director whose five increasingly dire Transformers films represent the nadir of the Hollywood intellectual property strip-mine. This is the director who, until now, had only managed a single “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes , for his 1996 prison caper The Rock . Funny kind of savior.

Ambulance doesn’t register as an actual departure for Bay, although it is modest by his standards, with a $40 million budget and a down-to-earth setting on the streets of Los Angeles. Based on the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen , Ambulance follows adoptive brothers Danny Sharp and Will Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Danny is a bank robber, following in the footsteps of their notorious father, while Will is a combat veteran who left the criminal life behind. Will’s wife Amy (Moses Ingram) needs expensive surgery, which insurance won’t pay for; in desperation, Will appeals to Danny, who draws him into a big score: an armed raid on a federal bank. The heist goes wrong, rookie cop Zach (Jackson White) gets shot, and as Will and Danny look for an escape route, they hijack the ambulance carrying the injured cop and the paramedic treating him, Cam Thompson (Eiza González). The hostages give the brothers a level of protection from the pursuing forces of the LAPD, but also complicate things for them — especially for Will and his conscience — as an escalating chase roars across the city.

It’s an effective premise that sets up both the outward action of the chase and the pressure-cooker drama inside the ambulance. Bay is also completely unafraid to exploit and echo two iconic L.A. thrillers of the ’90s, Heat and Speed . He borrows extensively from the imagery of both films: Heat in a ferocious, shatteringly loud downtown firefight between cops and robbers outside the bank; Speed in all the aerial and zoom shots of a municipal vehicle being chased around the freeway system by a battalion of police cruisers and choppers that have to keep a wary distance. Does Bay also stage slow-motion footage of the ambulance plowing through standing water along the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River, Terminator 2 -style? Of course he does.

Ambulance ’s greatest strength is how quickly it builds tension. The plot and main characters are set up with brisk efficiency to get us to the action as quickly as possible, and the pace and pressure pile on steadily from there. The film’s structure has an inherent momentum that Bay supercharges with his relentless filmmaking energy. The middle third of the film, as the first stage of the chase and the tensions inside the ambulance reach a simultaneous climax, is truly breathless stuff. But it’s simply not possible to sustain that level of excitement over such a long running time, and the air goes out of the movie toward the end, especially after some overdeveloped plot mechanics require the ambulance to stop and start again more than once. Bay and screenwriter Chris Fedak didn’t learn Speed ’s lesson: Never, ever stop rolling.

It’s a minor mystery what actors as talented as Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen II are doing in this film. Not because it’s beneath them, but because Bay, a director with an overbearing style and an itchy trigger finger in the edit suite, rarely sees actors as anything more than moving elements in the frame, and he’s unlikely to give them much room to do their work. Abdul-Mateen II, an actor of tremendous physical and emotional gravitas, looks slightly, stoically lost, like he’s struggling to keep up with the film’s gonzo energy — although he does have good sympathetic chemistry with González. Gyllenhaal, who has few inhibitions and an instinct for pulpy intensity, finds the film’s level with ease, however. To his credit, Danny remains an unpredictable and morally ambiguous character, as well as an entertainingly unhinged one, for longer than the film’s simple schema should allow.

But the main character in Ambulance is really Michael Bay, who, even in a comparatively grounded piece like this, attacks every single moment in his urgent, maximalist style. That style — often known as “Bayhem,” and analyzed in an excellent Every Frame a Painting video essay — is much derided for its incessant camera movement; its disorienting, rapid cuts; and its lack of nuance. It should not be mistaken for incompetence or incoherence, however: It’s a deliberate stylistic choice, implemented with tremendous technical skill.

There’s no denying that Ambulance is a dizzying assembly of footage that’s twice as impressive for being (mostly) in-camera, practical effects and stunts. The shotmaking can be breathtakingly audacious, and it comes in a delirious barrage, driven by Lorne Balfe’s pounding score. Drone cameras plunge down the sides of buildings, wheel through mazes of pillars at speed, and glide underneath leaping cars. Shots other filmmakers would linger on with pride, Bay gives one or two seconds before lining up five more. The excess is sinful, the storytelling is garbled, the effect is overpowering (especially in a theater). It made me laugh, half in mockery, half in elation.

Nothing is too much for Bay. That is why Ambulance eventually flags under its own overindulgence. That is why what should be a lean and efficient thriller has a surprisingly huge and complex cast of supporting characters. (Garret Dillahunt, approachably macho, stands out as the captain of the crack LAPD squad.) That is why there’s a ludicrous subplot involving a gangster cartel and a radio-controlled minigun, and a scene of improvised surgery using a mobile phone, a hair clip, and a face-punch for anesthesia. But it’s also what makes it a thrill, and a kind of luxury, to watch Bay take Bayhem out of the CGI workstation and back out onto the streets. Out there, his technical ingenuity can shine, and his proud tastelessness starts to look like a kind of retro cool.

Ambulance is in theaters now.

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“Ambulance,” Reviewed: Michael Bay Plays Himself

By Richard Brody

Michael Bay’s new film, “Ambulance,” which opened in theatres last Friday, is being hailed as an exemplary Michael Bay film: a large-scale delivery device for quick-cut action sequences, explosions, quips, and more explosions. It’s Bay’s first theatrical release in five years, and one of the few non-“ Transformers ” movies he’s done in fifteen. Yet, despite the Bay imprimatur, the main quality of “Ambulance” is its virtual anonymity. In both his methods and his attitudes, he empties the film of any trace of creative personality. “Ambulance” reminds me of one of the few good films of the misbegotten Dogme 95 movement, “ The Boss of It All ,” in which the director Lars von Trier used a system that he called Automavision , a computerized control of his camera: “We push this button on the computer and we get given six or eight randomized set-ups—a little tilt, or a movement, or if you should zoom in.” So it is with “Ambulance,” in which Bay sacrifices his modicum of directorial originality in order to whip up a frenzy of mechanized excitement with a story that could have been generated by Automatext.

“Ambulance” is a post-heist movie—the botched bank robbery at its center is merely the pretext for an extended chase. Two brothers in Los Angeles—Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal), a career criminal who’s the ringleader of the job, and Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Marine veteran in need of fast money—are the two survivors of the heist. They get away (toting thirty-two million dollars in cash) by hijacking an ambulance in which an E.M.T. aide, Cam Thompson (Eiza González), is tending to the police officer, Zach (Jackson White), whom Will shot during the escape. The premise of the chase is that only Zach’s grave wounds, and Cam’s exacting care to keep him alive, are restraining the authorities from swooping in and stopping the vehicle. The intrepid Danny, who is on his thirty-eighth bank robbery in ten years, declares, “We’re a shark: we don’t stop.”

The bulk of the film—and bulk it is—is tactical: Will (an expert driver) and Danny take daring, evasive measures; Cam’s formidable medical skills are pressed by Zach’s deteriorating condition; law enforcement, its command split between the crusty Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) and the starchy, young F.B.I. agent Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell), tracks the robbers and tries to trap them. As Danny makes increasingly bold and complicated plans to elude capture, he sparks conflict with another gang of criminals led by a man known only as Papi (A Martinez), a ruthless agent for drug cartels.

Each of the characters has a salient trait or two to explain his or her actions with a forensic specificity that takes the place of any dramatic curiosity. Yet the script, by Chris Fedak (based on a Danish film from 2005), is gaudily decorative—it adorns the characters with patter and riffs, with extraneous details that simulate the stuff of life without any substance. These verbal ornaments give the actors something to work with, lines to inflect and emotions to contrive, as hectic distractions from the fact that their characters are purely puppets, pulled by the dictatorial strings of plot. The flashy performances are a tribute to the actors’ talent—especially Gyllenhaal, González, Dillahunt, and O’Donnell, who conjure a sense of spin on leaden absurdities. Abdul-Mateen II has the hardest job, because the script gives him even less to work with: Will, a slightly more malleable character, is entirely in the service of filling plot holes, and Bay doesn’t even feign interest in his personality.

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What Bay is up to in “Ambulance” is motion, which isn’t quite the same thing as action. It isn’t enough that there are car crashes—drivers losing control, vehicles losing traction, concrete shards flying at the camera like sand kicked by a beach bully, people scattering and smashing with a casual indifference befitting only clay figures. It isn’t enough, because much of the movie—with its negotiations and decisions, its wrangling and planning—involves talk, and Bay films it to appear continuous with the copious scenes of violence. Even when the characters are sitting still, the camera doesn’t stop moving. The panoply of angles, realized seemingly with handheld cameras subject to jolts from the hazards of the shoot, merely simulates substance and emotion; the images suggest expressive inflections that they don’t actually provide. Moreover, these neutral images are edited together at a pace that’s frenetic even for Bay. The montage offers giant helpings of images, furnishing infinitesimal substance; for the viewer, it’s a mental race to keep up with the jumble—and that jumble is what takes the place of bodily movement. Bay makes generous use of drones to follow vehicles from overhead, but much of the drone footage is similarly ornamental and provisional, swooping between a billboard’s stanchions or gyrating haphazardly around the vehicular drama to splatter the movie with more movement than its characters and vehicles alone can furnish.

The handful-of-confetti approach to cinematic composition matches the skittering script in almost entirely lacking a point of view. The few moments that provide one—overhead surveillance images of the ambulance that show only what the pilots see—do evoke, a few seconds at a time, method and thought. Even the aesthetic sensibility that Bay flaunts in the “Transformers” franchise is mostly missing from “Ambulance,” too—although it’s hinted at, during the robbery scene in the bank lobby, in a few quick shots of characters in closeup from a very low angle that seems to press them against the crosshatched, light-stippled ceiling. It lasts maybe a total of two or three seconds, but it sparks imagination.

It’s the very sense of nothingness, of frantic agitation that surrounds and even distracts from the action, that is the movie’s main distinction. Bay’s images may be empty or trivial, but they do far more to give the film its identity and its substance than the performers do. (One scene, involving a bit of surgical derring-do under pressure, winks at the giddy absurdity of the movie’s entire conceit, brandishing a sense of cartoonish hyperbole that the movie otherwise suppresses.) The whirlwind of empty images of arbitrarily infinitesimal durations taken from an arbitrary abundance of angles suggests the vague desire for anything but realism. For better or worse, Bay is immune to the myth of cinematic transparency, the belief that it suffices to depict an action in a plain, unadorned way in order to capture its substance, significance, and physicality. That’s why Bay, at his best, is a lighthearted cynic, a casual ironist, whether expressing his tall-tale delight in inexcusable dimness, in “ Pain & Gain ,” or, in the “Transformers” franchise, his sensual delight in aestheticizing its trivialities.

In “Ambulance,” however, Bay tries to have it both ways. He takes the plotting very seriously, burdens characters with earnest motives and troubles, yet presents them in a throwaway style and allows them no self-expression, no identity. The movie is indifferent to the humanity of its characters, is detached from the realities of its recognizable setting, and takes a nearly pornographic delight in the depiction of pain and discomfort. If the movie has any merit at all, it’s in the seemingly unintentional mockery of the conventions and styles of far more purposeful and intention-laden films. In its chaotic whirl of tinsel images, it thumbs its nose at the kind of plain realism that too often passes as synonymous with sincerity. Yet Bay’s substitute for realism isn’t imagination or fantasy but merely unrealism. His naïve insolence punctures the vanities of other filmmakers while offering no alternative, and the movie that results is a joyless, confused self-abnegation.

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Ambulance Review

25 Mar 2022

Ambulance (2022)

Michael Bay ‘going small’ is everyone else’s ‘going absolutely bloody massive’. Ambulance , the action specialist’s 15th feature film, was trumpeted as a return to the director’s roots, shot rapidly in the summer of 2020 on a fraction of the budget he usually plays with. His roots, of course, were hardly subtle affairs, and neither is Ambulance — but it’s the closest to his career-high, The Rock , that he’s been in years.

After the self-indulgent misfire of his last film, 6 Underground , this is a cracking example of how Bayhem can work (to an extent) within some tight parameters. The straightforward premise, taken from the Danish film of the same name, is sound: two brothers, one of good heart ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , on steadfast form), one near-psychopathic ( Jake Gyllenhaal , on deranged form), one paramedic hostage ( Eiza González , the grown-up in the room), and one ambulance, versus the entire LAPD. On paper it’s about a bank heist, but the film rattles through that part fairly quickly, because this is to its core a chase movie; like Speed before it, it takes the concrete highways of Los Angeles as its grand stage.

Almost reassuringly, Bay’s hallmarks are still here. Golden hour is still 24 hours long. Clichéd dialogue still abounds (“Nobody knows this city better than you!”). Bay has still never met a lens he doesn’t want to flare. Anything that can explode probably still will. But he’s added some new feathers to his cap: in an audaciously meta move, Michael Bay characters are now able to reference and even quote previous Michael Bay films; his camera is nowhere near as sleazy as it once was; and spiralling drone shots give his frame dizzying new perspectives.

At times you will wonder how the hell a camera even fitted between the congruence of speeding metal and conflagrations.

Those acrobatic angles, in fact, add an entirely new dimension to Bay’s action, and the action is really the only reason we’re all here. At times you will wonder how the hell a camera even fitted between the congruence of speeding metal and conflagrations. The pace, meanwhile, is relentless and white-knuckle. “We’re locomotives,” screams Gyllenhaal’s character at one point, “we don’t stop” — which really sounds like Bay describing his own work ethic. Lord knows how a man approaching 60 can keep these energy levels up.

It’s by no means always coherent: that relentless pursuit of pace often results in hard-to-follow editing, and the director seems to share the same philosophy towards sound-mixing as Christopher Nolan, with sonic fury sometimes prioritised over audibility. Much of the film pays serious respect to police militarisation, too, which seems out of step with the mood of America. And a lot of it is just tremendously silly: a farting dog is a key plot point, while someone yells at a crucial moment about their cashmere jumper.

It doesn’t all work. But when the sirens are blaring at their best, it is a reminder of why nobody does bold, brash, bonkers blockbusting quite as thrillingly — or loudly — as Bay.

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Screen Rant

Ambulance review: michael bay delivers an intense, entertaining actioner.

It’s one of the most fun Bay movies in a long time, with a great cast that elevates the somewhat thin plot that results in an engaging actioner.

Ambulance is certainly a Michael Bay movie, if the amount of destroyed cars and explosions are any indication. The film’s action is intense and the stakes incredibly high. While the director’s movies from the last decade haven't necessarily been memorable or often good, Ambulance is a return to form. Adapted from the 2005 Danish film of the same name, and from a screenplay by Chris Fedak, it’s one of the most fun Bay movies in a long time, with a great cast that elevates the somewhat thin plot that results in an engaging actioner.

Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a U.S. Marine veteran who is struggling to find work. He’s doubly stressed because his wife Amy (Moses Ingram) needs an experimental surgery that their insurance refuses to pay for. Desperate, Will goes to his brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a loan. An expert bank robber, Danny convinces Will to help him pull a bank heist that would leave them with $32 million. Will agrees and things seem to be going smoothly enough when a rookie cop, Zach (Jackson White), gets involved unknowingly, leading Danny and Will to hijack an ambulance with EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González) inside to get away.

Related:  Michael Bay Interview: Ambulance

Ambulance is a thrill ride from start to finish, though it does go on for 15 minutes too long, which undercuts the momentum of the film quite a bit. For the majority of the film’s runtime, Danny and Will are inside the ambulance with Cam, stuck in a high-speed chase with the Los Angeles Police Department and one FBI agent (Keir O’Donnell) on their tail. It’s a tight space in the vehicle, and one would think that the suspense would start to taper off rather soon after the brothers take it, but it only amplifies the tension and makes the payoff all the better. The action itself is impressive. There are, of course, exploding vehicles and high octane chase sequences that will entertain audiences.

The camerawork is also great here, often panning up the side of a building before plummeting down and around in a 360-degree rotation that can be nauseating and exciting all at once. Such moments ramp up the intensity of every scene, leaving viewers continuously wondering how Danny and Will are going to escape. While the film is big on action and spectacle, it’s grounded by the relationship between Danny and Will, brothers who don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things but care for each other quite deeply. Will is calm but intense, whereas Danny sounds like he’s about to lose it at any given moment. They balance each other quite well, and the audience gets a glimpse into their strained dynamic, the pain of the past and different perspectives that have driven them apart as much as it has brought them together.

Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny delivers an over-the-top performance that works because it's so ridiculous. The actor delivers certain lines with a charm that is underlined with frustration. Gyllenhaal plays Danny with a lot of barely held back anger and in moments where he’s shouting about blue vs. green paint or pondering on people’s perception of his sensitivity compared to Will, it comes off as (perhaps unintentionally) comedic. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, on the other hand, imbues Will with a sense of unease that is tinged with desperation to save his family and not see anyone hurt. Abdul-Mateen is the heart of the film; he has a striking presence and conveys a lot of his character’s emotions through his eyes. He and Gyllenhaal make for a great pair, which becomes all the better when Eiza González’s Cam is thrown into the mix. González nails her performance as an emotionally closed off Cam, holding everyone at arm’s length. She brings a sense of rationale to the proceedings and the actress certainly delivers.

Ambulance is a good time at the movies and one of the most fun Bay films in a long while. The editing elevates the high-stakes tension and the action sequences are exciting, rarely losing their edge. While the film meanders for a bit and is longer than need be, it maintains a good balance between character dynamics and the thrill of the chase. And with a fantastic cast at its center, audiences will surely be entertained overall.

Next:  Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Review: Knuckles Steals The Show In Fun But Stuffed Sequel

Ambulance released in theaters April 8, 2022. The film is 136 minutes long and is rated R for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout.

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Ambulance Reviews

It has a fast-paced start that can be felt from the action-packed first half, but, unfortunately, in its wake of chases it loses speed when crossing predictable highways that are marked with clichés and conventional characters. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 20, 2024

Michael Bay at his best & even at his worst…. But still it’s a damn good time at the movies. Jake Gyllenhaal is unhinged, Yahya Abdul brings the emotional core with Eiza Gonzalez. I was on edge the entire time & I can’t wait to see it again

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

It’s the runtime that ultimately ruins Ambulance. Had the film been 90-minutes, instead of two hours and sixteen minutes, it would have been much more effective. It’s difficult to maintain a sense of tension over the course of a movie that long.

Unfortunately, the rest of the sequences are not as solid or engaging as the first one.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 21, 2023

Just like Michael Bay, Ambulance had a fleeting premiere on the marquee, as fleeting as the impact it generates. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 3, 2023

Everything he does is still about big explosions, big guns, big stakes, big car chases, big actors, big cameras. The only thing not big in this movie is the drones they use to fly around random places in Los Angeles.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 30, 2022

One of Michael Bay’s better action thrillers in years! Yahya & Gyllenhaal sell me on their brotherly relationship & every reaction decision they make from the start. It’s engaging, entertaining & action packed with a finish line which works in Bay’s favor

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 26, 2022

High on the blam-blam-blam and low on the yak-yak-yak, this is the big-screen barrage of suddenly shattering windows, improbably airborne vehicles and impressively exploding objects you’ve been waiting for.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 30, 2022

In every way, this is the most Michael Bay film he’s ever done. Maximum Bayhem...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 13, 2022

It is, for better or worse, one of the most Michael Bay-esque Michael Bay films to date. Likely due in part to that excess, it is also one of the strongest.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 22, 2022

There are some weird swings at humor (a few land, many don’t) and the movie begins to run out of gas well before the two-hour mark. But there are some good twists that keep this from being your conventional heist-turned-chase movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 16, 2022

The film suffers under a rambling screenplay penned by Chris Fedak...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 9, 2022

An ugly approach to cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jul 26, 2022

Never mundane, [Michael Bay] expands on the lamest of all action genres, the bank heist, to find the form’s sensual, kinetic potential. Everyday dazzle.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2022

A bonkers, self-reverential, albeit tolerable Michael Bay movie accompanied by his characteristic high octane, macho, hyperbolic sledgehammer style.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 28, 2022

The infinite monkey theorem is far more limiting on solely the film front, as it posits that a monkey screeching orders from the director's chair will almost certainly create a Michael Bay movie (like this one) at some point in time.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 26, 2022

When Bayhem sparkles like it mostly does in Ambulance, it's its own kind of thrilling experience.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2022

The Ambulance almost immediately exceeds its intended scale, turning what should be a lean and mean retrograde high-concept hostage situation into a sprawling, geographically incomprehensible tour of one of the most gridlocked cities in the United States.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jun 22, 2022

A character-driven film featuring questionable morals, an insane car chase through Los Angeles, and more one-liners than a cheap bar, Ambulance represents a return to form for the explosive-minded Michael Bay.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 13, 2022

Despite many attempts to liven it up with large doses of spectacle, it just can't compensate for a story on a fast track to nowhere, resulting in a rather forgettable action extravaganza.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 12, 2022

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Common sense media reviewers.

Lots of crashes, blood, swearing in Michael Bay chase movie.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Movie asks questions about what makes a hero and w

Cam can be a bit short and unemotional, but she's

The three main characters are a White man, a Black

Lots of blood: spurts, puddles, etc. Heavy gun use

Brief, affectionate kisses between couples.

Very strong language, with uses of "f--k," "mother

Several brands showcased: Nike swoosh on character

Character says that she was addicted to speed. Cig

Parents need to know that Ambulance is director Michael Bay's action movie about two thieves hijacking an ambulance and starting a massive chase across Los Angeles. It's chaotic, show-offy, and too long, but it has likable characters and an offbeat, appealing sense of humor. Violence includes guns and…

Positive Messages

Movie asks questions about what makes a hero and what makes a villain. Even while it oversimplifies things in some ways, it's still an interesting theme worth discussing.

Positive Role Models

Cam can be a bit short and unemotional, but she's also heroic and strong and saves lives. Will, despite making a poor choice, is decent and helpful; he gives blood to save a life, tries to do the right thing whenever possible. Other main character Danny is a through-and-through villain.

Diverse Representations

The three main characters are a White man, a Black man, and a Latina. Two secondary male characters are married. Wide range of diverse background characters. Brief "dragon lady" stereotype of an angry Asian woman.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Lots of blood: spurts, puddles, etc. Heavy gun use/shooting. Characters are injured and killed. Gory operating sequence. Bloody wounds. Tons of car crashes. Explosions. Punching, fighting. Child in car crash, metal post impaled through her torso, in pain. Fire extinguisher to face. Man grabs a woman, holds her down. Frequent arguing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very strong language, with uses of "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "bulls--t," "bitch," "son of a bitch," "a--hole," the "N" word, "goddamn," "ass," "dumbass," "moron," "d--k," "balls," "Jesus Christ." Middle-finger gestures.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Several brands showcased: Nike swoosh on character's shirt, characters eat/discuss Cheetos, Keurig Coffee mentioned, Oxygen banking app shown, Birkenstock sandals shown and mentioned. References to earlier Bay movies Bad Boys and The Rock .

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Character says that she was addicted to speed. Cigar smoking. Pill bottles shown (to indicate that a character is ill).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Ambulance is director Michael Bay 's action movie about two thieves hijacking an ambulance and starting a massive chase across Los Angeles. It's chaotic, show-offy, and too long, but it has likable characters and an offbeat, appealing sense of humor. Violence includes guns and shooting, deaths, blood spurts/puddles, bloody wounds, crashes, explosions, fighting, punching, a gory operation, and a child in pain and peril (a metal post is shown protruding from her torso). Strong language includes frequent uses of "f--k," "s--t," and more. Several brands are shown or mentioned, including Nike, Cheetos, Birkenstocks, Keurig Coffee, etc. A character says that she was addicted to speed, there's brief cigar smoking, and prescription pills are shown. Two couples kiss briefly. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (8)

Based on 4 parent reviews

What's the Story?

In AMBULANCE, former U.S. Marine Will Sharp ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) is out of work, has a small child, and needs more than $200,000 for an operation for his wife. He goes to his adoptive brother, Danny ( Jake Gyllenhaal ), a career criminal, to ask for help. Instead, Danny asks Will to come along on a bank robbery, which he promises will go off without a hitch. Meanwhile, a rookie cop ( Jackson White ) who's worked up the nerve to ask out one of the bank tellers, talks his way into the bank while the robbery is in progress. The cop upsets the robbery and is shot. Will and Danny see their chance for escape when an ambulance arrives to pick up the wounded man. With kidnapped EMT Cam Thompson ( Eiza González ) in tow, the robbers must go on the run while keeping the bleeding cop alive -- or face the wrath of the entire LAPD.

Is It Any Good?

A typically over-the-top Michael Bay production, this exhausting, far too long action movie still surprisingly passes muster with its batch of colorful, likable characters and wiry sense of humor. With the bulk of the movie's running time following the ambulance racing through city streets while pursued by cops, as well as multiple crashes and shoot-outs, Ambulance certainly could have benefited from some tightening. One of the biggest twists -- a plan to use decoys to finally evade the police -- takes a very long time from conception to execution, and a good deal of momentum is lost along the way. Plus, it's just hard to be constantly gripping your armrests for that long.

Additionally, Bay's pointless, show-offy camerawork, with daredevil swoops from bizarre, impossible angles, may cause headaches. Even so, Ambulance has so many quirky touches -- and such an appealingly strange sense of humor -- that moments like a desperate, ruthlessly gory life-saving operation or a break to listen to a little Christopher Cross are irresistible. Gyllenhaal, especially, is at the top of his game, as manic and zany here as he was in Bong Joon-ho's Okja , barking one-liners in a way that suggests he's really enjoying all this. His enthusiasm seems to lift up co-stars Abdul-Mateen and González, and they feed on his energy. A fine use of Los Angeles locations and backdrops completes the picture, ultimately making this a not bad big-screen offering.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Ambulance 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Are Danny and Will heroes? Villains? Anti-heroes? Were you rooting for them to get away or to get caught? Why?

Are characters three-dimensional and powerful, or are stereotypes used? Why is diverse representation important in the media?

Do you consider Cam a role model? Does she have agency? Why is that important?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 8, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : April 29, 2022
• Cast : Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , Eiza Gonzalez , Jake Gyllenhaal
• Director : Michael Bay
• Inclusion Information : Black actors, Female actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Cars and Trucks
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : intense violence, bloody images and language throughout
• Last updated : September 11, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Ambulance (2022) Review

Bayhem is better than ever.

“Michael Bay is an auteur.”

It’s an odd statement, but it doesn’t make it any less true when you think about it. While you’d be very hard-pressed to put him on the level of a Kubrick or Tarantino or anything of that sort, when it comes down to it, Bay delivers on a singular style of maximalist action that when he does well, he does REALLY well. Ambulance is no exception.

A remake of a 2005 Danish film of the same name, Ambulance centres on Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Will is an army veteran struggling to keep up with his wife’s medical bills, and after he can’t afford an expensive form of surgery, he turns to his adoptive brother and career criminal, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a loan. Danny, by almost hilarious coincidence, happens to be on his way to robbing a Los Angeles bank for $32 million and convinces Will to join the crew.

As expected in these things, things go catastrophically wrong. The police are closing in, the rest of the crew is dead, and the brothers are forced to escape by hijacking an ambulance carrying a paramedic named Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) and a wounded rookie cop (Jackson White) they had accidentally shot earlier. The film becomes a feature-length chase as the trio need to keep the cop alive, as well as escape from the LAPD and the FBI agent hot on their trail.

After a somewhat brief intro setting up the main trio’s personalities, the movie becomes absolutely relentless from the heist onward. When the characters say “we never stop”, the movie takes that as a literal mantra. Ambulance features all the trademarks you could expect in a Bay flick : explosions, shootouts, sweat against what seems like perpetual sunset, the works. This time around, Bay discovered a tool in his arsenal: Drone cameras.

Bay has these drones zipping up, down and through buildings, cars, highways and all over the place in very inventive, if slightly disorienting camerawork. And even where the action itself is concerned, the film is mostly well-shot and well-paced in its escalation. The movie constantly adds another new element the moment you think it would start to get boring, whether it be having to perform a high-risk surgery while at 60 MPH, or the added dynamic of a ridiculously well-armed Latino gang Danny is affiliated with.

“ Ambulance features all the trademarks you could expect in a Bay flick: explosions, shootouts, sweat against what seems like perpetual sunset, the works.”

The three lead performances also work very well with each other. Eiza Gonzalez portrays Cam as a hard-edged personality who is just as charismatic and engaging as the brothers are in her own right. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives off a very sympathetic performance as the one with the most to lose. However, the stars shine brightest on Jake Gyllenhaal , who is clearly having the time of his life. Danny is a ticking time bomb who Gyllenhaal manages to combine with a mixture of wide-eyed, manic glee and unbridled rage. It gives off similar energy as Nic Cage in the opening of Face/Off , and it’s a joy to watch. It’s worth watching just for him screaming about cashmere.

The few issues that are there are essentially the standard excesses of Bay flicks. While the original film was a lean 80 minutes, Bay and screenwriter Chris Fedak manage to stretch the premise to a nearly-exhausting 2 and a half hours. While it manages to sustain interest for most of the runtime, there is a slo-mo montage near the end to wrap up all the character arcs that could have been heavily trimmed down.

Whether Ambulance is for you depends entirely on your feelings for Michael Bay. That being said, despite those excesses, Ambulance is still Michael Bay’s most focused film in years. Compared to the gleeful sociopathy of his last two decades of films like the entertaining 6 Underground, Bad Boys II and the awful Transformers series, it feels like a grounded throwback to Bay’s 90s era. Bayhem is back and hopefully stepping in the right direction if we get more like this.

Final Thoughts

Hailing from the gritty streets of…a suburb outside Toronto, Shak has thrived on becoming a walking encyclopedia of millennial pop culture. From a very early age, he gained an adoration for film, television and video games that hasn’t subsided in the years since. Now a film writer for CGMagazine, he has dedicated his life to gaining as much knowledge of useless trivia as his brain will allow. If he isn’t trying to clear his endless film and video game backlogs, you can catch him getting overly hyped about everything from hip-hop to wrestling on Twitter and TikTok.

This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, CGMagazine may earn a commission. However, please know this does not impact our reviews or opinions in any way. See our ethics statement.

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Ambulance review – Michael Bay hijack thriller pumped full of radioactive steroids

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal are the duo who take over an ambulance after a heist goes wrong in a film with no workable script

Michael Bay , the hyperactive thyroid of action cinema, has taken a scrawny little low-budget Danish film called Ambulancen from 2005, about two criminal brothers who hijack an ambulance, and has put an IV in its tiny arm and pumped it full of radioactive steroids.

The result is a supersized remake which runs one hour longer than the original: an LA action movie with explosions, black-and-white cop cars twirling through the air, muscly guys with big beards and big guns (but no hair) growling menacingly, senior police officers with mirror shades staring grimly off in repose at the skyline, gutsy paramedics – and an adorable big dog which one officer sentimentally takes to work with him in the car. Hysterically kinetic cinematography means that no one can run in one direction without the camera swooping in the opposite direction overhead.

Ambulance has everything … except actors giving a decent performance as believable characters in a workable script. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Will Sharp, a decorated military veteran who badly needs money for his ailing wife’s operation. In desperation, he turns to his dodgy adoptive brother, smoothie career criminal Danny Sharp, played by Jake Gyllenhaal with a twitchy array of supposedly smartass wisecracks and who perhaps has been encouraged by the director to display a worryingly uncharismatic kind of “charisma”, running counter to Gyllenhaal’s talent for deliberative coolness.

Danny instantly and implausibly recruits Will as a driver for the bank heist he is going to pull off in half an hour. Erm, is that a good idea given that Will has no training or aptitude for the job? Don’t ask. Anyway, the robbery goes mightily sideways; the boys wind up shooting a cop and shoving him into the ambulance they’ve commandeered at gunpoint, in the back of which paramedic Cam Thompson (Eiza González) has no choice but to keep the cop alive as they zoom through the streets with the police in fierce pursuit – often smashing through sidewalk fruit stalls in the time-honoured manner. There’s even a traditional scene driving down the LA River.

If only Bay had used the natural style and humour of Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen. Instead, they look like people who have never met before stepping out of their luxury trailers. In dialogue scenes, each man looks as if he is looking at a green screen, and González has nothing to work with. For all the spectacular action set-pieces, there’s something silly and tedious that sets in well before the two-hour mark. It flatlines.

• Michael Bay
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• Los Angeles
• Crime films

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