Ambulance

In Michael Bay's latest film, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a quick-witted, charming psychopath.

But Will comes to Danny for financial help and immediately gets embroiled in a bank heist that goes bad and leads to long (a key word here) and repetitive (another key word) combat with L.A.’s finest SWAT phalanxes. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. - Opinion: When Russia Loses the U.N. . . . Michael Bay, the director, working from a screenplay by Chris Fedak, has spent decades keeping audiences in a state of anxious arousal (“Transformers,” “Pearl Harbor,” “The Rock”). In this action adventure, the apotheosis of his career thus far, cheerful idiocy occasionally rises to the level of delectable lunacy. Will, an ex-Marine, is a good man struggling to provide for his family. The main thing you need to know about “Ambulance,” showing only in theaters, is that it’s insane.

A thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast.

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. And as far as Bay’s concerned, that means he held up his end of the bargain. 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. 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. And so Will reluctantly reconnects with his flashy, glib brother, with the intent of borrowing money to pay for Amy’s upcoming surgery. And Bay’s latest, “Ambulance,” is a thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast.

This week, pop culture critic Richard Crouse reviews new movies: 'Ambulance,' 'Sonic the Hedgehog 2' and 'Minamata.'

“What gets left out of the fine print,” he says, “is that it can also take a piece of the photographer’s soul.” The gruff Smith is initially reluctant, but his growing fondness for Aileen, an assignment from “Life,” and his own sense of journalistic integrity change his mind. “Minamata” is a mix-and-match of a few different things. It hits familiar beats of corporate callousness, but offers something new in the stunning recreations of Smith’s photos, specifically “Tomoko in her Bath,” the most famous picture from the portfolio. The story begins in 1971 in New York. Smith (Johnny Depp) is at the tail end of a legendary career. Aileen wants the eyes of the world to focus on the problem. We don’t stop,” but occasionally tapping the brake might give the viewers and the actors a chance to catch a collective breath. A standard, save-the-world video game story with an unusual amount of CGI, it doesn’t pave any new paths forward, but fun performances—both live and CGI—keep things buoyant for most of the slightly too long two-hour running time. To save the world, Sonic teams with Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey), a yellow fox with two tails who appears through a magic portal. When Tom and Maddie go on a Hawaiian vacation, Sonic is left to his own devices. “Ambulance” isn’t a heist movie. The bank heist goes off without a hitch, but the getaway is rough.

The more we change, the more Michael Bay stays the same. If, almost 20 years ago in Bad Boys II, stealing a car from Dan Marino naturally leads to our ...

Bay never settles on a coherent point of view besides that of the camera’s—juxtaposing the absurd confines of the ambulance with the absurd sprawl of L.A., his characters beholden to the reality of what we see—and, like in a Seijun Suzuki gangster flick, there is “nothing,” a void, outside our view. Instead, Bay seems to have emerged in 2022 as not exactly “woke”—the comment about the ridiculous budgets of police departments being the most political he gets—but more concerned with depicting the immovable forces closing in on a person simply trying to survive. Bay’s action, literally all over the place and unbounded by physics (one swooping drone shot down the side of a crenelated building exists only for itself, but tonally jars the viewer from the slipstream of chaos unfolding, leaving unease and not a little bit of horniness in its wake), blots out nuance. This is Bay’s distinction between the “haves” and “have nots”: People who have mortal trauma and people who don’t. The film’s disposable blue collar Italian lump, Randazzo (Randazzo Marc), puts it simply: “L.A. drivers! His action responds accordingly: As is the case with the films of Bay’s aesthetic soulmate and contemporary icon, Tony Scott, Ambulance aches with a kind of coke-addled, luxury painterliness, cubist cuts (Why show a man walking through a door when you could show a man walking through a door from three wildly different angles and also show a close-up of Jake Gyllenhaal’s eyes?) and the subliminal speed of the images blurring into sumptuous bundles of color and motion, our brains just trying to keep up. Subsequently, they shoot a cop (Jackson White) and commandeer the cop’s ambulance, also occupied by the “best” EMT in L.A., Cam Thompson (Eiza González)—just one more embittered soul in the grand gray tapestry that is the City of Angels. As Danny loses control and Will more and more accepts his fate as the offspring of a fabled bank-robbing psychopath, their bank robber father spoken of in hushed tones and unbelievable stories, the entire militarized might of the LAPD descends upon the stolen ambulance, led by Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), a man who festishizes the police enough that Bay doesn’t have to. That cinematographer Roberto De Angelis has only worked on one other film—JR and Agnes Varda’s Faces Places at that—and here seems to so seamlessly understand the director’s visual taste, leaves little doubt that Bay’s is a singular voice. Though an ensemble of Angelenos fills out the film as it barrels to pretty much the only conclusion it could have, Ambulance is about as tidy as a Michael Bay film can get. Maybe Michael Bay no longer sees the utility in unleashing psychopathic cops on a psychopathic world, but maybe he never did. Bad Boys and the fever dream of Bad Boys II are about how Michael Bay thinks that cops must be psychopaths in order to confront a modern psychopathic world. If, almost 20 years ago in Bad Boys II, stealing a car from Dan Marino naturally leads to our mass-murderous buddy cops, Marcus (Martin Lawrence) and Mike (Will Smith), swerving between naked corpses tumbling from the back of the bad guys’ truck—Marcus desperately whining, “This is unnecessary!”—then logically there is nowhere else to go, the indulgence of a legendarily indulgent director manifesting entirely. Bereft of complicated plot and mostly self-contained, the movie succeeds in feeling retroactively fresh; any online chatter about an ACU (Ambulance Cinematic Universe) spoils just how invigorating it can be in 2022 to get an action thriller from an old hand blockbuster director that reads as untouched by—downright disconnected from—any hyperliberal marketing machine.

In Michael Bay's latest film, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a quick-witted, charming psychopath.

But Will comes to Danny for financial help and immediately gets embroiled in a bank heist that goes bad and leads to long (a key word here) and repetitive (another key word) combat with L.A.’s finest SWAT phalanxes. - Saks Fifth Avenue:$20 off sitewide + free shipping - Saks Fifth Avenue coupon You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. Michael Bay, the director, working from a screenplay by Chris Fedak, has spent decades keeping audiences in a state of anxious arousal (“Transformers,” “Pearl Harbor,” “The Rock”). In this action adventure, the apotheosis of his career thus far, cheerful idiocy occasionally rises to the level of delectable lunacy. Will, an ex-Marine, is a good man struggling to provide for his family. The main thing you need to know about “Ambulance,” showing only in theaters, is that it’s insane.

Yahya-Abdul Mateen II listens to Jake Gyllenhaal's proposal in Ambulance. (Image credit: Universal Pictures/BayFilms). The following contains major spoilers ...

And now Will is probably going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Even if a lawyer was able to successfully argue that Danny was primarily responsible for all of that, there is no argument in the world that will absolve Will completely. When Zach fails to accuse Will of having shot him, we’re even given the impression that Will might avoid the worst possible punishment for his crimes, but is that really the case? Injured Will takes a package of the stolen money, and asks Cam to be sure his wife gets it. Cam plays off the shooting, claiming that she doesn’t know who shot Will and Danny, with no other choices, races to the hospital. Will and Danny’s ride makes it to Papi’s hideout, where they plan to simply pay him half of the $16 million they escaped with, and ride off into the sunset.

Michael Bay finds in the 2005 Laurits Munch-Petersen-directed Ambulancen the perfect vehicle to execute his action-laden mayhem.

Again, this is a ride and that is the end game. The fault is not in our stars, and quite frankly if all you want is a freeway chase, this one delivers on that score. Gyllenhaal plays Danny Sharp, son of a notorious criminal who is following in his father’s footsteps by trying to pull off a massive, record-setting bank heist of $32 million. Of course this is manna from heaven for the likes of Bay (Transformers, The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys, etc.) who never met a chase he couldn’t exploit or pound into the ground. That playground is the freeways and streets of L.A. Local residents are used to seeing movie-style chases involving the LAPD and various suspects take over actual newscasts, with choppers flying overhead to get all the action from various angles. In The Guilty, Gyllenhaal was manning an emergency call center and all the action took place there, a kind of one-man show.