Thirteen years ago, I called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — Michael Bay's self-engrossed auto erotica — "the most totally awesome artifact ever of the end of the American empire." Nine years ago, in Transformers: Age of Extinction, Bay contrived to have a car — not even an alien robot one, just a regular car — punch a man in the face.
What's now clear is that any notion of "Peak Bay" is fleeting: We may be there at this moment, but another Michael Bay monstrosity is always looming, and the filmmaker is never content to rest on bombast past.
And so, herewith, Ambulance.
Even grading on the Michael Bay curve, this movie is borderline incoherent... which is something I've said about previous Bay flicks. It's not the plot that's incoherent, but mostly because there's almost none to speak of. What's incoherent is the action, which is a problem in a movie that is nothing but action.
Ambulance is little more than a feature-length car chase through Los Angeles as bank robbers Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) run from law enforcement in a stolen ambulance. And when I say "through the streets of Los Angeles," you'll mostly have to take my word for that: Apart from a sequence in the iconic LA river — that concrete channel with some puddles in it — this could be almost anywhere. And not only is there a dearth of big-scale geographic context at play, there is even less small-scale physical context on the street-by-street level. Police cars carom around, not so much following the ambulance but tumbling into a screaming deluge of metal and rubber. There could be cinematic drama in the violence, elegance in the high-speed driving. There could be visual ballet to the rollovers and the explosions. But it's all just random vehicular chaos enacted with the same energy of a 4-year-old smashing his toys.
This goes on for more than two hours, all on the same mindlessly intense level. Ambulance is all forced ferocity with no downtime. (Maybe a nonstop car chase works in Ambulancen, the 2005 Danish film this is based on, which runs 76 minutes. It's exhausting and relentless here.) This is theoretically unfurling in something close to real time, except any temporal context is a mess, too: In one scene it's early afternoon, with high sunlight and bright skies. Then it's sunset, the light low and shadows long. Then we're back to afternoon again. Because Bay is incapable of not fetishizing that "magic hour" of golden sunrise or sunset, even if it makes no chronological sense to do so.
Bay's cinematic compulsions always win out, no matter how inappropriate. Will is supposed to be a good guy who needs to raise money for his wife's medical bills... and just as we learn this, Bay deploys his other can't-miss fetish, the American flag waving majestically in the breeze — in that golden magic hour, natch — with zero irony, as if paying for health care via crime were the proper order of things. Will ends up getting sucked into Danny's heist because of their supposed adoptive-brotherly connection, but Bay's slow-mo-flashback attempts to cement that relationship are about as convincing as a margarine commercial, and Will's status as a good guy is challenged, to say the least, by the absolute citywide carnage he is complicit in. Danny doesn't give us much to cheer for, either: He is an unrepentant criminal psychopath, and Gyllenhaal doesn't try to make him even evilly charming.
How in love with himself is Bay? He manages to squeeze in complimentary references to not one but two of his own previous films: Bad Boys and The Rock.
It's exhausting here at empire's end. ♦
