For such a well known director, Michael Bay has a pretty thin CV. Since his mid 1990s debut Bad Boys and follow up The Rock, the only semi-decent movie is 13 Hours. Otherwise, his filmography is littered with the dreadful Transformers films and includes the risible Pearl Harbor. What is clear is that Bay knows little about subtlety or restraint, a point hammered home by Ambulance.
Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is desperate for cash to pay for experimental treatment for his sick wife. He unwisely agrees to get involved in a bank robbery headed up by his bother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). When it goes wrong, they hijack and flee in an ambulance containing Zach (Jackson White), a police officer (shot in the robbery) and paramedic Cam Thompson (Eiza Gonzalez).
It takes a big suspension of disbelief to get anything out of Ambulance. Danny seems to have taken no care whatsoever in assembling his inept crew for a job that involves stealing more than $30 million in cash, a sum of money that seems very easy to transport. Will goes from adamant that he won’t get involved to being in the gang far too easily, and Cam can seemingly perform medical miracles in a speeding van with little equipment.
Bay does though deliver to begin with. The heist is very well=staged, fully utilising his kinetic style. There is also a very tense, if silly, sequence where Cam operates on Zach. But his usual faults are also on display. At a bloated 136 minutes, this is over an hour longer than the Danish film it is based on. It severely runs out of steam in the final third with Bay’s insistent, swirling camera becoming tiresome. The characters are pretty sketchily drawn and the script is very uneven.
Gyllenhaal is a fine actor when he keeps things somewhat bottled up, but here he is allowed to go way over the top with poor results. The only performances of note come in the supporting roles from Garret Dilahunt as an admittedly cliched police commander and especially Olivia Stambouliah as a drily sarcastic officer.
This could have been a tightly made, exciting 90 minute movie, but instead is patchy and overlong.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10