Deep into director Michael Mann’s 1995 crime epic, “Heat,” a team of skilled criminals attempts to steal millions of dollars from a Los Angeles bank. When a highly trained police unit arrives on the scene, machine gunfire erupts in the streets around the bank as the thieves attempt to flee with giant bags filled with cash.
It is an incredibly well-shot sequence, and it is riveting.
A similar sequence takes place early on “Ambulance,” the action-packed drama from director Michael Bay arriving in theaters this week. It's largely a frustrating mess as Bay's director of photography, Roberto De Angelis, implements a buffet of different shots that serve mainly to disorient the viewer.
It’s a helpful hint of what’s to come throughout the rest of the two-hour-plus affair.
A bombastic mashup of “Heat,” 1994’s “Speed” and 2002 “John Q,” “Ambulance” probably is what we should have expected from the director of “1998’s Armageddon,” the “Transformers” movies and, most recently, the 2019 Netflix release “6 Underground” after he’d been cooped up early on in the pandemic.
In fact, “Ambulance” — about two brothers who, following the problematic heist, hijack an ambulance, complete with two hostages, to try to escape the authorities — was born out of Bay looking for a project his crew could shoot in a tight window in and around L.A. curing COVID-19 lockdown protocols, according to the movie’s production notes.
That became a script from Chris Fedak, co-creator of the TV series “Chuck,” based on the Danish thriller “Ambulancen.”
This high-octane American update stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp, son of a notorious and ruthless robber of banks, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as his adopted brother, Will, who years ago left the family to enlist in the Marines and then served overseas.
Will, seeking for a way to pay for the expensive surgery his wife needs and that insurance won’t cover due to its experimental nature, visits Danny to ask for a hefty loan. Danny says he doesn’t have the money but, as luck would have it, is about to lead a crew attempting to relieve a bank of $32 million. And he could really use another man he can trust.
Will reluctantly agrees, but this gig clearly doesn’t align with his current moral compass.
After complications that occur during the heist — including, but not limited to, the arrival of a tactical-surveillance police team — Will shoots a patrolman, Zach Parker (Jackson White, “Mrs. Fletcher”), to save his brother.
Although badly wounded, Zach makes it into an ambulance staffed by paramedic ace Cam Thompson (Eiza Gonzalez) and her overly chatty new partner, Scott Dawkins (Colin Woodell, “The Flight Attendant”). Needing a way to get past a police blockade, the brothers steal the ambulance, removing Scott in the process but leaving Cam in the rear working to keep Zach alive until he can be admitted to a hospital.
While the brothers are able to break loose initially, the cops soon know two of the criminals are in the ambulance and begin to pursue it on the ground and from the air. Because they’re aware of the hostages — and that one of them is a cop — they allow the vehicle to keep moving.
What follows is a game of chase chess, primarily between Danny and police Captain Tyler Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), the dog-loving leader of the elite police unit, and FBI Special Agent Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell, TV’s “Fargo”), with whom Danny has a past.
Danny will enlist the help of Hector “Papi” Gutierrez (A Martinez, “Longmire”), an L.A. criminal heavyweight who had a good professional relationship with Danny’s father, offering to split with him the millions with which he and Will were able to bring into the ambulance.
Much of the action takes place in the ambulance’s interior, represented by a set Bay and his collaborators effectively infuse with a sense of constant movement.
And it’s not as if Bay doesn’t impress in multiple ways.
For starters, that he shot this movie in fewer than 40 days is astounding given its myriad shots. The aforementioned De Angelis (“6 Underground”) and the movie’s editor, Pietro Scalia (”Black Hawk Down”), may well have been exhausted by the time their respective jobs were done.
Unfortunately, so much of their work — as well as the pounding musical score by Lorne Balfe (“6 Underground”) — adds up to so little substance.
Bay simply seems hellbent on dizzying the viewer. And that approach is warranted when we are meant to feel what characters are feeling, when a filmmaker is trying to put us in their shoes. In “Ambulance,” however, the camera is constantly zipping around — Bay uses a drone that shoots to the top of L.A.’s skyscraping air and then soars down it solely because he could — and the music is frequently banging with no apparent story-enhancing aims.
On the other side of the camera, Gyllenhall (“Spider-Man: Far From Home,” “The Guilty”) certainly knows he’s in a Bay movie and keeps his dial set to 10, with Danny constantly screaming at the cops, Cam and even Will.
Much better work is turned in by the regularly terrific Abdul-Mateen (“Us,” HBO’s “Watchmen”), Gonzalez (“Baby Driver,” “I Care a Lot”) and Dillahunt (“Fear the Walking Dead,” “Army of the Dead”). They actually manage to make their characters feel like real people in an extraordinary situation.
Bay — who, by the way, namechecks at least two of his earlier movies in this one — does stumble into a couple of nice moments: A high-risk medical procedure done in the moving ambulance is, while undoubtedly ridiculous, pretty gripping; and an instance of bonding between Danny and Will involving, of all things, a bit of yacht rock brings a guilty-pleasure smile to your face.
Bay aims to put smiles on faces and to give people their money’s worth, and he’s certainly done the latter again given all that happens in “Ambulance.” Nonetheless, this is just another mostly hollow affair from a director who specializes in them.
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‘AMBULANCE’
2 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout)
Running time: 2:16
Where to watch: In theaters Friday
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