The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
Ambulance is a remake of the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen (I haven’t been able to find an English translation of the title). I haven’t seen the original movie because it’s frigging impossible to find in this country (seriously, somebody point me toward a copy if you can), but I do know that it’s 80 minutes long. This version is 136 minutes long, which immediately begs the question of how one can add 56 fucking minutes to a story when trying to retell that same story. Director Michael Bay, in a rare break from making terrible Transformers movies, pulls off that magic trick by drawing this plot out to an excruciating length and making a high-speed chase feel like it is at a standstill for hours.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Will, a war vet that desperately needs money for a surgery for his wife. He goes to his adopted Danny (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) to ask for money and, as luck would have it, Danny was literally on his way to rob a bank at that very moment. Will reluctantly agrees, but the heist goes downhill fast. The brothers hijack an ambulance, taking an EMT and an injured cop along for the ride, and take off through downtown LA with the entire LAPD in hot pursuit.
That is a simple story, especially considering the manic pace of the film’s setup. The film wastes absolutely no time getting to the heist, setting the stage for a great action film that we never get. Instead, Ambulance quickly grinds to a halt as soon as the chase begins and, upon checking my watch, I realized that we had a solid 100 minutes of movie left. Despite how many shootouts the film throws at us, there simply aren’t enough characters or variations in the scenario to maintain interest for such a long period of time. We know that most (if not all) of the characters are safe because there are so few of them that the script couldn’t stand to lose anyone. We also know that the cops can’t catch them until the end because that would be, well, the end. A good comparison would be Speed, which is not only 20 minutes shorter than Ambulance, but it also has all of the other passengers on the bus to provide subplots and dialogue. Unlike Speed, the simplicity of the story in Ambulance becomes a major hindrance as the chase goes on for so long that one starts to wonder how the damn thing hasn’t run out of gas yet.
Michael Bay is seemingly trying to emulate Michael Mann and failing miserably because, even without giant transforming robots on display, he can’t resist using his trademark style. And by “trademark style,” I mean editing that seems designed under the assumption that there is a two-second time limit for holding a shot. I now know what the heist scene in Heat would be like if it was edited by a coked-up toddler, which is something that I’ve wondered about for years but is sadly disappointing in reality. There are sequences of shots that are placed in no discernible order, just random frames of guns firing and flashes of various vehicles, that are meant to convey the exhilaration of frantic action, but just make me wish that the camera would hold still long enough for me to know exactly what’s happening and where everyone is in relation to each other (conveying spatial awareness has been a frequent issue in Bay’s filmography). Bay has also discovered drones and, let me tell you, he is going to fucking use them. You better get used to pointless swooping aerial shots because, although they serve no purpose, you are going to see one every five minutes or so.
The saving grace here is Gyllenhaal. Danny is an unpredictable character, swiftly fluctuating from a seemingly nice guy to a complete bastard in seconds, and Gyllenhaal brings a psychotic glee to the character that would be worth the price of admission in a shorter film. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza González are also fine, though not particularly memorable (which is actually a decent summary of both of their entire filmographies at this point). While Gyllenhaal gets something to work with as the quasi-villain, the other characters have little to do but join the audience in waiting for the chase to finally end. Abdul-Mateen and González both looked a lot less bored than I did, though, which is why they are professional actors and I’m not.
I’m interested in seeing the original Danish film because, beneath the incredible amount of bloat and terrible editing, Ambulance has an interesting setup for a simple, character-driven thriller. However, “simple and character-driven” isn’t exactly Michael Bay’s strong suit. What could work as a short, Hitchcock-ian film collapses under the weight of its laborious running time, leaving me disinterested way, way before it finally reached the finish line.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulance_(film)#/media/File:Ambulance_film_poster.jpg
