‘Ambulance’ Review: Michael Bay Is Our Emergency Movie Technician
Earlier than the key chasing and capturing will get underway, the titular automobile and its heroic E.M.T., Cam Thompson (Eiza González), attend to a younger car-accident sufferer who has been impaled on a bit of wrought-iron fence. This type of mishap is a staple of exhibits like “Gray’s Anatomy” and “9-1-1,” and “Ambulance” will be seen as a sustained critique of tv’s domesticated presentation of catastrophe. Cam saves the kid within the morning and by the point rush hour rolls round is performing emergency stomach surgical procedure in the course of a automobile chase whereas conferring with trauma surgeons through video chat. Exploding vehicles and an exploding spleen, minimize collectively in good counterpoint: that’s cinema, youngsters.
So are the wild vertical drone photographs by which the digital camera rockets skyward earlier than plunging again to earth, a carnival-ride transfer that Bay provides to his repertoire of swooping, ricocheting, vertiginous results. And so, lastly, is the story, an old school concatenation of coincidences, collisions and foolproof plans gone horribly awry.
On the heart is a daylight theft that plucks $32 million from a financial institution — a modest haul in contrast with the $100 million Sean Connery was after in “The Rock” again in 1996, particularly while you alter for inflation. The principle robbers are Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who grew up as brothers, raised by a prison father. Flashbacks present their boyhood selves at play, however as grown-ups they’ve taken diverging paths. Danny adopted in Dad’s footsteps, whereas Will joined the Marines. Now married (to Moses Ingram) with an toddler son, he’s determined for cash to pay for his spouse’s most cancers remedy. Stopping by Danny’s administrative center to ask for a mortgage, he finally ends up signing on with Danny’s crew.
Ultimately they’re joined by two hostages: Cam and a rookie cop named Zach (Jackson White), whose companion, Mark (Cedric Sanders), turns into a part of an elaborate tour of the freeways and alleys of Los Angeles that additionally entails a variety of different folks on each side of the legislation. All of it finally ends up just about the place you count on it is going to, however the actors do a very good job of seething and emoting below stress, and Gyllenhaal does a risky, charming sociopath factor that isn’t as annoying because it may be.
So after a lot deliberation, my crucial verdict on “Ambulance” is: It’s a film!
Ambulance
Rated R. F-bombs, exploding vehicles, a ruptured spleen. Operating time: 2 hour 16 minutes. In theaters.
