AMBULANCE (2022) ★ ★
"Ambulance" is director Michael Bay's remake of the 2005 Danish movie "Ambulancen," and a lesson on what not to do with a remake. Chris Fedak's wilting screenplay about two brothers who hijack an ambulance to escape a botched bank heist extends the original story's 80 minute runtime by fifty-six minutes, and it feels like an eternity.
Michael Bay needs no introduction. He is well known for classics like "Bad Boys" and "The Rock." He has a bombastic style full of quick cuts and big special effects, and it served him well in the nineties and 2000s. He pulls from the usual bag of tricks in this film, but somehow none of them work, and even stranger, none of them feel particularly Bay-ish. For example, he employs a drone camera for several sweeping shots, but they wind up looking like he strapped a lens to a flying pigeon. I got vertigo watching "Ambulance," and none of its scenes involve heights.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play adoptive brothers with a shared predicament: they're both fleeing the FBI and the entire LA police force in a hijacked ambulance. But each man is in peril for different reasons; Gyllenhaal's Danny Sharp is a career criminal who simply wants thirty-one million dollars from LA Federal Bank's vaults, while Yahya's war veteran Will Sharp is trying to scrape together the finances to pay for his sick wife's hospital bills. Moses Ingram plays Amy Sharp, but isn't given much of a role, which felt odd to me. While this isn't a bad premise, Fedak's script woefully undercuts the credibility of Will's motivations by dwelling on his family's financial crisis for all of three minutes, with maybe forty-five seconds of dialogue fleshing any of it out.
The story then fast-forwards past whatever Will's fundraising options might've been and cuts to him making an ill-advised visit to his brother for help. Danny's answer to his desperate brother is basically, "Stop wasting my time and just rob a bank with me already." Being a veteran and a family man who apparently loves his wife and their newborn, the obvious answer for Will would be a resounding "No," but of course that doesn't happen. Instead he winds up right there with Danny, automatic rifle in hand, and I'm left wondering how he intends to explain himself, if and when he ever gets home.
The rest of the film is intriguing and entertaining only insofar as it is implausible to an extreme. Danny and Will's crew are killed by police, and the brothers accidentally injure an officer. This gives the story a way to intersect with the ambulance and its medic, a young lady named Cam Thompson, played by Eliza González. Cam is held at gunpoint and forced to care for the officer while Will drives like a maniac with countless police on his tail. Danny's solution is to contact a crime boss acquaintance for help, and his plan winds up being one of the least credible things Hollywood has ever coughed up. It's so ridiculous that I had to tack an extra star onto my rating for the sheer novelty and absurdity of it. Let's just say it involves a few decoy ambulances and a lot of green paint.
Despite all of this, I found Fedak's conclusion offensive. All parties need an ambulance when the joyride comes to an anticlimactic end, and the tongue-in-cheek feel of everything that came before devolves into two insulting scenes that no one can take seriously. "Ambulance" wants to send the message that crime doesn't pay, but it achieved that ten minutes into the film, when Danny refused to lend his brother the cash needed to pay for his wife's treatment. The remaining 116 minutes would've been more enjoyable if it had seen Amy off in the ambulance she needed, with Will and Danny supporting each other as loving brothers. Life is suspenseful and dramatic enough. It doesn't need Michael Bay to direct it.
--- Bill Fontaine
