By James Barber
‘Ambulance’ may be the first great movie gift to result from the COVID pandemic. Director Michael Bay, best known for the Benghazi movie “13 Hours” and the “Transformers” series, was all set to embark on “Black Five,” his latest high-budget sci-fi extravaganza when the world fell apart and the movie was canceled.
After nearly a year of sitting around at home, Bay was itching to get back in the game, and the suits at Universal Pictures tipped him that they held the rights to a 2005 Danish thriller called “Ambulance.” After he heard the plot outline, Bay agreed to take on the movie if he could make it quickly. “Chuck” creator Chris Fedak came on to write a screenplay for Bay, and the two men devised their movie without watching the 2005 original or reading its screenplay.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “The Matrix Resurrections”) plays Will Sharp, a Marine combat veteran whose wife needs a $210,000 operation that his insurance won’t cover. He’s forced to turn to his no-good brother Danny, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, star of “Jarhead” and the bad boyfriend who inspired Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.”
The men were raised by a notorious bank robber. Will joined the Marine Corps to change his path in life, but Danny followed in his dad’s footsteps and insists that Will join in on a $32 million heist at a downtown L.A. bank. Will can walk away with $4 million, get the surgery for his wife and never worry about money again. Easy in, easy out.
Things, of course, go terribly wrong, and the brothers end up trying to escape in an ambulance with a cop shot during the heist and an EMT, Cam Thompson, played by Eiza González (“Baby Driver,” “Bloodshot”). What follows is a closed-room drama (inside the ambulance) taking place in a moving vehicle that’s dodging law enforcement vehicles and helicopters through the streets of Los Angeles.
Nominally, we’re supposed to care if Will ever sees his family again and whether his wife will get the money for her surgery, but Bay is a lot more interested in the chase, all the technology he can employ on set to record that chase and how amazing his three leads look on camera.
Filming began in January 2021 and was completed in 38 days on what, for Bay, was a miniscule budget of $40 million. That quick-and-dirty shoot led the director to lean heavily on old-school practical effects with real car crashes and explosions on set. There’s a minimal amount of CGI in the movie, and the legendarily meticulous Bay was less than pleased with how budget limitations prevented the computer makeovers on a couple of shots turning out exactly the way he would’ve liked.
Bay told the French outlet Les Cinémas Pathé Gaumont: “All those explosions and cars flipping, that’s all real. That’s all live, real, ratchets. It looks very dangerous. It could be very dangerous if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Most of it is real stunts. There’s very few blue-screen shots on the movie. There’s not a lot of CGI. Some of the CGI is sh*t in this movie. There’s a couple shots that I wasn’t happy with, OK? All right.”
Truthfully, all the action in the movie is so spectacular that it was impossible to pick out which scenes he was complaining about, OK? Alright. These may be the best Los Angeles car chase scenes since the original 1974 “Gone in 60 Seconds.” You may think you like the crunch of meta on metal, but it’s doubtful anyone loves that sound as much as Michael Bay.
Part of the amazing look comes from Bay’s use of FPV drones to film the action. These first-person view craft are controlled by a pilot wearing a virtual reality headset and allow the filmmaker to get real shots that would have been impossible just a couple of years ago.
If you’re looking for a drama that sensitively lays out the medical crises faced by combat veterans and their families, “Ambulance” is not a movie for you. If you don’t mind that a character’s background as a Marine is used to support a couple of plot points in a roller coaster of a movie that’s more interested in how things go boom but doesn’t particularly care why, Bay has delivered something of a masterpiece.
