1 of 5 | Jake Gyllenhaal co-stars with the ambulance. Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
LOS ANGELES, March 24 (UPI) -- Ambulance, opening in theaters April 8, is everything you'd expect from a Michael Bay movie. That includes spectacular action and outrageous scenarios, along with occasionally cringe-worthy dialogue and potential caricatures.
Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a Marine veteran who cannot get insurance to cover his wife's experimental cancer treatment. They have a newborn, too, so Will agrees to go on a bank robbery with his brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), with whom he grew up under a criminal father.
The bank robbery goes south, and Will and Danny escape in an ambulance that arrived to treat a downed officer. Will and Danny take EMT Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) hostage so she can treat the injured officer while they make their escape.
The premise, based on the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen, sets up a daisy chain of complicated, intersecting stakes that maintain tension for more than two hours. Cam tries to escape her captors, lest any audience member wonder why she stays, but Danny nips that in the bud.
Plus, Cam still is an EMT. She's compelled to stay and treat the officer, while Danny and Will are desperate for him to live so they do not become cop killers.
One of the medical procedures on display in Ambulance is surely not medically sound. But by the same sort of scientific logic as Armageddon, it's awesome.
The last time a vehicular pursuit through Los Angeles was filmed so effectively was Speed. Ambulance isn't quite equal to that classic, but it's a favorable comparison.
Speed also was a leaner and simpler movie about keeping a speeding vehicle going. Ambulance is inherently a more complex chase as Will and Danny are also evading Capt. Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) and his police tactics.
The ambulance crashes through debris strewn streets when evading police. The looming threat of rush hour never quite pays off in further complications, but everything else does.
Bay's visual style was groundbreaking in the MTV era and translated to feature films. Not satisfied to rest on his laurels, Bay pushes his signature style to great effect in Ambulance.
Bay always favored low angles, but some shots in the bank robbery practically have the camera on the floor looking up at Gyllenhaal. What must be drone shots hovering above will flip midair over the city.
Gyllenhaal plays Danny as a charming ringleader who can be ruthless to get the job done. He cracks over the course of the chase and ultimately freaks out.
Bay still loves to have characters yell at each other, and they scream throughout the action. Mateen and Gonzalez are up to the task.
Cam is a capable paramedic, so it is a shame her brief character development still defines her in terms of romantic relationships, but otherwise the film recognizes her strengths on the job.
This is the first time Bay has included self-referential dialogue in his films as characters quote Sean Connery in The Rock and reference Bad Boys. It works better than some of the low-brow humor in past films.
Ambulance is mostly free of the most extreme caricatures of Armageddon and the Transformers movies. The most distracting is an FBI agent interrupted in couples therapy with his husband.
Ambulance drags on a bit with more crime gangs Danny and Will encounter. That's consistent with the overblown genre, but can be a bit exhausting at that stage in the film.
But, Ambulance moves so rapidly, it effectively plows through any minor shortcomings in the service of its mega chase. Bay promises a wild day compressed into just over two hours, and Ambulance delivers on that promise.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
