Sorry, I forgot to use the full title: AmbuLAnce or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bay.
I’ve been a defender of Michael Bay for a while. I don’t pretend he’s secretly one of our greatest filmmakers or anything, but I see the value of what he provides. He’s a thematically uncomplicated filmmaker who happily embraces what many credit as the death of cinema. There’s art in the ability to entertain though. If I need someone to make a movie with explosions, Bay gets my first call. We can absolutely make fun of his belief that anything that moves is made out of C4, his compliance with studio requests to add product placement, and his cheesy sense of humor. I hated some of those late Transformers movies as much as anyone. I also unironically love the first one. Pain & Gain is silly and fun. Armageddon is hokey and sincere in a weirdly resilient way. I like to joke that everyone has one Michael Bay movie they swear by. Over time, I’ve come to realize that the biggest problem with Michael Bay movies is how often people sit down to watch them not accepting that they are about to watch a Michael Bay movie. No, it’s not going to be as disciplined as Christopher Nolan or as coordinated as George Miller. The sooner we let go and learn to love it, the better.
It’s easy to imagine 20 years for now AmbuLAnce being the definitive Michael Bay movie. Not the most successful. Not the most influential. What I mean is it can be the one that you can show anyone and say “This is the good and the bad of the Michael Bay experience”. The plot is barely thrown together. Quickly, it establishes Yahya Abdul-Mateen as an army vet desperate for money to pay for surgery for his wife. I’m not even sure what she’s sick with. He goes to his adopted brother played by Jake Gyllenhaal who ropes him into a bank heist he happens to be doing that day. We don’t even see the most of the bank heist. It quickly moves to the heist falling apart and turning into a shootout. It’s sweaty how they get to the actual ambulance part of it. There’s no denying that. However, it’s exciting getting there and exciting once it is there.
This is a frenetic movie. Bay and Directory of Photography Roberto De Angelis aggressively keep the camera moving. Aggressively! Bay uses drone shots like he’s a 12-year-old who just got one for Christmas. Two characters can’t even talk to each other without the camera doing a circle around them. I don’t think this was an accident either. This movie is meant to stress and exhaust you. The camera is in movement even before the plot is. It’s antsy to get to the action, and when the action starts, it’s hesitant to let up. I’m not here to say what Bay can and can’t do. Maybe he isn’t capable of finding the tension in stillness. But in AmbuLAnce, the unrelenting movement is a choice he’s made, and it works for the movie. By the end, I was exhausted. The movie does eventually back itself into a corner where maybe a cleverer screenplay didn’t have to, but that’s sort of the point. I think it’s inarguable that Bay met his level of ambition with this one. Honestly, it’s incredible when you think about his budget. This allegedly cost $40 million, but with the cast, explosions, locations, and scale I would’ve guessed well over $100 million. Realizing that afterwards really impressed me.
This is a movie full of Michael Bay characters. No one is all that interesting. I never really bought the bond between Abdul-Mateen and Gyllenhaal as adopted brothers. Eliza Gonzales as the paramedic trapped in the ambulance with them and an injured cop felt like they just slapped the Megan Fox in Transformers template onto her. Supporting characters like Garrett Dillahunt and Keir O’Donnell feel similarly templated. I kind of like how most of the attempt at banter is sharper and meaner than expected. At this point, it feels like people join a Michael Bay movie as an experience to do at least once in their career. Earn a decent paycheck to deliver an OK performance while soaking in the large and busy production. I mean, Bay has been doing this successfully for a while without a history of exploding budgets or production overruns. He must be good at managing the madness.
This movie is absolutely silly. Most of the laughs in my theater were from people like me hitting a breakpoint from the audacity to deliver certain lines or story beats. I cannot convince someone with a cemented distaste for Bay to give this movie a chance. I get the reasons to dislike his movies, but if you’ve even found yourself even passively enjoying one of his movies, AmbuLAnce is worth seeing eventually. The best advice I can give is to ignore the title. It’s a “heist gone wrong” movie. As that, it delivers.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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