Ambulance (2022)
1/4
I’ve never been a fan of Michel Bay’s work but I went to see his newest movie, Ambulance, with a open mind, hoping that this may just be one of his better films. Unfortunately, my hopefulness was short lived. This movie—which is based on a Danish movie from 2005—is everything that I hoped it wouldn’t be. Ambulance is an overlong, convoluted pile of nonsense that has no respect for logic or even the basic human desire to be entertained.
Lead actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Matteen try their hardest to make this movie watchable and, for the most part, they do a good job. I had no trouble buying their brotherly relationship and both of them were really charming. That’s about all that I can say I enjoyed about the flick, though.
Ambulance made me angry, and I mean flames-coming-out-of-my-hair angry. Let’s talk about the short-on-logic plot of this movie. It’s about an ex-soldier named Will (Abdul-Matteen) who needs money to pay for a life-saving surgery for his wife, so he contacts his estranged criminal brother Danny (Gyllenhall) and asks him for a job. Danny ropes Will into taking part in a logic-defying bank heist which, unsurprisingly, goes terribly wrong.
This movie expects us to believe that a professional thief, right before attempting to pull off a heist, would add another team member to his crew; it also expects us to believe that a professional thief would walk past a security camera without a ski mask on and smile at the camera, then go upstairs to commit a robbery. (Come on, put on a mask: this movie was filmed in the middle of a pandemic; all we did was wear masks.)
Also, can we talk about Ambulance’s horrendous excuse for cinematography? Much of the movie was shot on drones, which was clearly another bad idea because the whole thing is just two-plus hours of awkward, zoomed-in shots of different parts of LA with the occasional shots of the actors’ faces mixed in there. It was so bad. I mean, not just bad to the point where I couldn’t tell what’s going on: it actually made me feel physically nauseous. So, the cinematography could have used a bit more work.
I mean, it’s still not as bad as Bay’s last two Transformers movies, but Ambulance is a non-thrill ride that fans of Bay will love and people who crave real entertainment will hate.