Ambulance

Ambulance is an action movie for people who don’t watch action movies. That would normally include examples by blockbuster producer/director of the Transformers and Bad Boys franchises) Michael Bay. But don’t worry, thanks to an intense performance by Jake Gyllenhaal and the work of a first class technical and post-production crew including cinematographer Roberto De Angelis and editor Pietro Scalia, Ambulance, a remake of a 2005 Danish film Ambulancen, pushes the requisite thrills and spills to the max whilst at the same time providing a lean but surprisingly engaging dramaturgy.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays struggling Middle East veteran Will Sharp. His wife requires hospital treatment but as he’s unemployed he has no medical insurance. He turns to his adopted brother Danny (Gyllenhaal) for help. Danny however is a career criminal who’s about to rob a bank of $32 million and he persuades Will to join his team. The heist goes, to put it mildly, pear-shaped, and the brothers escape in a hijacked ambulance with a wounded policeman and Emergency Medical Technician, Cam (Eiza González), trying to keep him alive. A white-knuckle chase involving a flotilla of police cars, SWAT vans and helicopters ensues, carving a trail of destruction through the (somewhat under-populated) streets of L.A.

After a first act that sketches in the film’s main characters: Will’s good husband desperate to take care of his family; Danny’s brought-up-wrong loose cannon (this, we are informed is the 38th! bank he’s robbed) and Cam’s trauma-hardened EMT, the main act begins with the blood-bath that owes a good deal to the equivalent scene in Michael Mann’s 1995 genre masterpiece Heat.

Bay’s film may not be a masterpiece but the action both inside and outside the ambulance is (if you’ll excuse the pun) well-stitched together as Cam tries to keep the police officer alive with a bit of surgery on-the-go guided by two trauma surgeons who FaceTime her from a golf course as Danny rides Will (who is hooked up like a make-shift blood-bag to the cop) through the escalating mayhem of explosions and crashes like a Valkyrie on the road to Hell.

It’s preposterous stuff but excepting the cheesy, formulaic coda it’s done with such relentless brio that one can’t help but enjoy it.

 

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