Rated: MA15+
Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Michael Bay, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Ian Bryce
Screenplay by: Chris Fedak, based on the original story and screenplay for the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen by Laurits Munch-Petersen and Lars Andreas Pederen
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González.
‘We’re a locomotive, we don’t stop.’
Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) are escaping a bank robbery gone wrong in an ambulance.
They have two hostages, an EMT (Eiza González) and a shot cop needing emergency surgery.
It’s a Michael Bay action movie.
And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way.
But some of the storyline, like the emergency surgery conducted by Cam the EMT in the back of the ambulance with instruction via Face Chat from surgeons taking a break from playing golf, pushed the storyline to the ridiculous making the cast have to work really hard to make the film believable enough to be watchable.
Yes, it’s a classic action film, with some awkward humour that rarely hit the mark, and yet being a classic action the light-hearted crazy from bad-brother Danny complimented the high-speed chases as the two brother are chased across LA by choppers and souped-up cop cars all to a soundtrack that just kept revving faster and faster.
It’s a quintessential LA setting with graffiti, and rubbish-strewn streets; the city lights and mesmerising, layered highways. Ambulance is about two brothers growing up in LA, one who follows in his father’s footsteps, a well-known robber with a reputation of being psychotic, the other brother choosing a different life, to become a marine.
So there’s a back-story to the brothers’ relationship that keeps up the drama; Will doing right but right doesn’t pay for his wife’s desperately needed surgery. So when he asks his wayward brother for money, it’s a matter of Will having to help him pull off a $32 million bank heist to get it.
And Danny can be very convincing.
Then there’s the EMT Cam – she can keep anyone alive for 20 minutes, but no one wants to be her partner.
One of the highlights of the film is Cam mystified seeing the two brothers singing the 80s classic, Sailing, while trying to relax mid-escape.
There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour mixed with flashbacks to childhood montages with emotive music that kinda worked. But what really worked in this film was the awe-inspiring camerawork that had the action spinning around to fly straight up into the air.
Really, the car chases and explosions are next level.
So medical procedures, high speed car chases and strange humour that had me scratching my head, like – ‘what did you do to my legs?!’ asks one robber after his legs are twisted the wrong way after being run over.
But overall, Ambulance is worth a watch just for those high-speed action shots.