Ambulance (2022)

Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, Jackson White, Colin Woodell, Olivia Stambouliah, Cedric Sanders, Moses Ingram, A Martinez, Wale Folarin. [R]

With his wife needing a costly surgery, desperate Abdul-Mateen reaches out to his adoptive career-crook brother (Gyllenhaal) for help, and gets roped into a bank robbery that ends badly and results in a getaway by ambulance with a pair of hostages in tow—wounded cop White and EMT González. Sure, this kinetic crime actioner very likely rates as director Bay’s best since 1996’s The Rock (a movie that gets an ultra-gratuitous reference here), but that’s damning with faint praise, indeed; it’s still still a long, loud, dumb, and numbing “product” with cringey comic relief and over-the-top so-called thrills that are defined by size, chaos, and property damage. Gyllenhaal puts in the expected effort, but it’s a routine charismatic sociopath he’s playing; Abdul-Mateen is talented enough to give us an anti-hero worth rooting for, but the character is woefully underdeveloped beyond basic motivation and decency. But, of course, character and plot each take a distant backseat to the (faulty) adrenaline delivery system, which is defined by a frenetically-agitated visual scheme where an unbroken two-second shot is called a “long take”, and those choppy clips are provided by what can best be described as a random camera generator—whiplash lurches among closeups and wide shots, smooth rotating pans and dizzying drone sprints, Dutch angles and jittery handhelds, and so on. Length is the film’s biggest problem, as the same narrative and filmmaking technique might have made for an adequately-diverting 90-minute programmer, but at over two-and-a-quarter-hours, this thing really starts to drag down the stretch, especially the overwrought denouement that just won’t end already. Lorne Balfe‘s relentless score rumbles, churns, throbs and pounds up from the bottom layer nearly every step of the way, drowning out a good portion of the dialogue, and becoming (like the film itself) exhausting overkill. Based on a 2005 Dutch movie, Ambulancen…which, sure enough, is almost an hour shorter.

39/100