AMBULA AMBU LANCE NCE Bayhem Runs Out of Road
Review by Alice Jones-Rodgers. Subtlety has never been Michael Bay’s strong point and from the director who has most recently treated us to far more films about robots in disguise than anybody deserves comes another two hours of high-octane nonsense, ‘Ambulance’. Despite being heavily based on the off-beat and altogether more enjoyable 2005 Danish film, ‘Ambulencen’, which manages to tell this story of a bank heist and attempt to escape in a stolen ambulance in a spritely eighty minutes whilst still managing to find time for a bit of sardonic humour in the process, ‘Ambulance’ is a film which flatlines from the outset, its stupidity and cavernous logic gaps there for all to see even within its opening scenes. As dumb as those opening moments of
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‘Ambulance’ are, with war veteran Will Sharp (Yayha Abdul-Mateen II), desperately in need of $231,000 to pay for his wife Amy’s life-saving surgery, being talked into taking part in a $32 million bank heist by his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllanhall), but the pair, despite Danny’s face being plastered all over the FBI’s website as one of the LA’s most wanted criminals, neglecting to wear face coverings, at least they are rapid, lasting only a few minutes before we are aboard the ambulance for the next utterly brainless two hours. In fact, those opening moments of ‘Ambulance’ happen so fast that there is far too little time allowed for the relationship between Danny, the gung-ho criminal, and Will, the more sensible brother who has only taken part in the heist as an absolute last resort, to be explored, which is a shame because it could have easily been the film’s strongest aspect. Oddly though, the film is held together by neither Gyllanhall or Abdul-Mateen’s cartoonlike characters, but that of Eliza González in the role of EMT Cam Thompson, who, as everything explodes around her (body parts and all) in the usual Bay manner, is in the back of the ambulance keeping a bank hostage accidentally shot by Will, LAPD officer Zach, alive. Amongst Thompson’s activities are carrying out a medical procedure which, whilst impossible in an ambulance hurtling along at sixty-miles-per-hour, at least
