ambulance of death movie review

One does not hire Michael Bay for subtle adult drama. The blockbuster producer/director of the “ Transformers ” and “Bad Boys” franchises does have a distinctive style—it’s just that all of his authorial signatures involve massive explosions and dizzying drone shots. And Bay’s latest, “Ambulance,” is a thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast.

“Ambulance” is a remake of the 2005 Danish film “Ambulancen,” with a few key differences. Both are about brothers who turn to bank robbery to pay for a relative’s medical bills. But here, the recipient is changed from a dying mother to a sick wife, juicing the conflict between career criminal Danny Sharp ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) and his adopted sibling, struggling veteran Will ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ). Bay’s world is one of good guys with principles and bad guys without, even when those principles cease to make any logical sense. But it’s not about making sense. It’s about big, thunderous emotions.

In both films, the ensuing heist goes horribly wrong, forcing the duo to hijack an ambulance as a combination getaway vehicle/camouflage so they can escape the police cruisers and SWAT vehicles and surveillance trucks surrounding the bank. But in Bay’s version, the poor sap dying in the back of the stolen ambulance isn’t an everyday heart patient, but a wounded cop. (What, you didn’t think badge worship would factor into this story?) And while “Ambulancen” runs a tight 80 minutes, “Ambulance” stretches its legs at a leisurely 136.

That’s not to imply that there’s anything relaxing about watching “Ambulance.” The film opens on an emotionally manipulative register, panning over medical bills and pill bottles bathed in the same golden light that surrounds Will’s saintly wife Amy ( Moses Ingram ) as she cradles their newborn child. Amy’s cancer diagnosis has pushed the couple’s finances to their limit. And so Will reluctantly reconnects with his flashy, glib brother, with the intent of borrowing money to pay for Amy’s upcoming surgery. But Danny—who Gyllenhaal plays like the character has Red Bull and cocaine for breakfast every morning—offers him one better: Rather than a few hundred thousand dollars to appease the insurance companies, how about a payday of $8 million?

That’s the botched robbery mentioned above, which plays out like “Heat” on steroids following the introduction of the film’s third lead, Cam Thompson ( Eiza González ). In typical action-movie character style, Cam is the best damn EMT the city of Los Angeles has ever seen—able, as she puts it, “to keep anyone alive for 20 minutes.” She’s also (surprise, surprise) cynical and hardened, snapping at her newest partner that it’s just a job and she doesn’t care what happens to the little girl she just rescued from a bloody car crash where the child was impaled on a piece of wrought-iron fencing.

Will Cam’s hostage experience—she’s the EMT in Danny and Will’s stolen ambulance, if you haven’t yet put that together—reignite her passion for saving lives? Who’s to say? What can be said is that once the ambulance takes off on a “ Speed ”-esque chase through the streets of a curiously traffic-free Los Angeles, the stakes escalate until Cam is wrist-deep in the cop’s open chest cavity, performing a life-saving procedure with the help of two trauma surgeons who FaceTime in from a golf course. Blood is spurting from the cop’s wound in squishy geysers. Danny is behind the wheel, mowing down traffic cones and speeding the wrong way up highway overpasses at 60 mph. Will is attached to the body on the stretcher, serving as a human blood bag like in “ Mad Max: Fury Road .” An FBI hostage negotiator is on the phone, demanding to know what the hell is going on. Everyone is screaming. And then Cam’s laptop goes dead. She’s got to finish this surgery on her own—and the cop’s spleen just burst.

In short, “Ambulance” is all peak and no valley, a breathless roller coaster ride that’s made all the more discombobulating by Bay’s hyper-kinetic shooting style. In early dialogue scenes, the camera pivots around the characters in dramatic low-angle shots. And once the action gets going, the combination of volatile drone photography—one of Bay and cinematographer Roberto De Angelis ’ favorites is to zip up the side of a DTLA skyscraper, then plunge back towards the concrete with nauseating speed—and frenetic editing makes it difficult to tell at times who’s chasing whom and in what direction. And the flaming cop cars flying in all directions, including directly towards the camera, don’t help the legibility issue.

The thing about roller coasters is, though, that they’re a lot of fun. And if you surrender to the chaos and allow your brain cells to scatter like so much fruit sent whizzing through the air as the titular vehicle crashes through an LA street market, “Ambulance” is a blast—a disorienting, overly long blast, but a blast nonetheless. Bay seems to be having fun, too: he stuffs the film with as many comic relief moments as he does everything else, casts his own dog in an absurd cameo role, and allows multiple references to earlier Bay films from screenwriter Chris Fedak to make it onto the screen intact. The movie looks like it cost more than its $40 million budget, thanks to the sheer volume of flaming destruction on screen. And as far as Bay’s concerned, that means he held up his end of the bargain.

Now playing in theaters.

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of The A.V. Club from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and RogerEbert.com.

Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp
Eiza González as Cam Thompson
Garret Dillahunt as Captain Monroe
Keir O’Donnell as FBI Agent Anson Clark
Moses Ingram as Amy Sharp
A Martinez as Papi
Chris Fedak

Original Music Composer

Lorne Balfe
Michael Bay
Pietro Scalia

Director of Photography

Roberto De Angelis

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At top speed and with sirens wailing, Ambulance comes riding to the rescue for audiences facing an emergency shortage of Michael Bay action thrills.

If you're looking for an action-packed movie that doesn't rely on deep dialogue, complex characters, or even a story that makes a ton of sense, Ambulance absolutely delivers.

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Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Michael Bay

Jake Gyllenhaal

Danny Sharp

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

Eiza González

Cam Thompson

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Movie Clips

‘Ambulance’ Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in Michael Bay’s Retro Excessive ‘Die Hard’ on an EMS Van

It takes you back to an age when action thrillers were big, loud, decadent, “rebellious,” and ripped off from "Die Hard." But this one, in its violent throttling way, is joyless.

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In “Ambulance,” there’s no such thing as an establishing shot of a vehicle cruising along a freeway that isn’t immediately followed by an off-angle, camera-whooshing-through-the-air operatic heightening of that shot. The camera doesn’t just move, it throttles — gliding, plunging and rocketing forward, traveling through tunnels and bending around corners. And the film’s editing revives the old cut-cut-cut machismo of here’s-what-a-former-music-video-director-is-made-of. It’s action montage on Adderall. It’s all supposed to be relentlessly jacked, but too often the folly of the Bay style is that it trowels on aggressive techno filmmaking energy like frosting, substituting it for a situation that’s actually authentically suspenseful.

Does Danny have an ingenious plan to pull off a heist of $32 million? Amazingly, no. He’s got a crew of gnarly henchmen, including one they call “Mel Gibson” (because he looks nearly as scary), but after making the tellers get on the floor, the men walk around without masks, as if no one would be able to identify them. When a naïve rookie cop, Officer Zach (Jackson White), asks to come into the bank because he wants to flirt with one of the tellers, it’s only a matter of time before their cover is blown.

The slovenly lack of design — not just in the robbery but in Chris Fedak’s script, which is longer on late-’80s/’90s attitude (“These sons of bitches are about to have a really bad day!” ) than it is on logic — gives the audience a curious relationship to Danny and his crew. Do we want to see these jokers succeed? Even as movie criminals, they don’t do a lot to earn our affection or respect, and from the start it’s clear that they have almost no chance. (Are they going to escape the entire LAPD in a hard-charging ambulance?) But if not, then what are we spending this 136-minute movie rooting for? Abdul-Mateen’s Will, the noble straight shooter, is our entry point into the film, but for a long time Gyllenhaal, in jabbering-psycho-lite mode, dominates the proceedings, and the character’s scurrilous abrasiveness is more wearying than charismatic.

Danny and Will aren’t biological brothers — Will was taken in by Danny’s father and raised as his sibling. But that father, we learn, was himself an infamous criminal; the whole family-background thing is a little abstract and a touch ludicrous. Chris Fedak has obviously studied the if-it-feels-good-f—k-it screenwriting method of early Shane Black, and he comes up with at least one scene that’s too nuts for words: Cam (Eiza González), the spitfire paramedic hostage, gets on the cell phone with her surgeon ex-boyfriend to guide her through an impromptu operation, with no anaesthetic, on Zach, who has a bullet in his spleen, which bursts right in front of us. At this point you may seriously wonder if you’re having fun yet.

The ’90s school of overripe action excess (Bay! Willis! “Con Air”!) produced a few classic movies, like the transcendently gonzo-yet-plausible-at-every-moment “Speed,” but mostly it was about turning off your brain and turning up the volume. There’s a place for that, and I’ll confess that as a critic I was too harsh at the time about a poker-faced preposterous intergalactic ballistic romp like “Armageddon.” Yet “Ambulance” is simply too much of a not-so-good thing. It never stops huffing and puffing to entertain you, but it’s joyless: a tale of escape that’s far from a great escape, because for all its motion it’s going through the motions.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, March 23, 2022. MPAA rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release, in association with Endeavor Content, of a Bay Films, New Republic Pictures, Project X Entertainment production. Producers: Michael Bay, Bradley J. Fischer, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Ian Bryce. Executive producers: Michael Kase, Mark Moran.
Crew: Director: Michael Bay. Screenplay: Chris Fedak. Camera: Roberto De Angelis. Editor: Pietro Scalia. Music: Lorne Balfe.
With: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza Gonzalez, Moses Ingram, Jackson White, Cedric Sanders, Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, A Martinez.

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Cast & crew
User reviews

Jake Gyllenhaal, Eiza González, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Ambulance (2022)

Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry. Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry. Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry.

Michael Bay
Chris Fedak
Laurits Munch-Petersen
Lars Andreas Pedersen
Jake Gyllenhaal
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
Eiza González
1.2K User reviews
228 Critic reviews
55 Metascore
11 nominations

Top cast 52

Danny Sharp

Cam Thompson
(as Eiza Gonzalez)

Captain Monroe

FBI Agent Anson Clark

Officer Zach

Lieutenant Dzaghig

Officer Mark

(as Wale Folarin)

(as Devan Long)

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia The limited space inside of the ambulance required Jake Gyllenhaal to hold the camera for a couple of takes.
Goofs When Nitro the dog is in the back of the police vehicle, there's a shot where you see the dog through the rear passenger window with a dog handler (wearing a green sweater) visible in the back seat at 1:06'36".

Danny Sharp : We're not the bad guys, we're just the guys trying to get home!

Will Sharp : Well, we don't get to walk off into the sunset!

Crazy credits At the end of the end credits not only director Michael Bay and producer Bradley Fisher get to say their special thanks but also the dog: "NITRO THE DOG WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE SPCA" (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)
Connections Featured in Teletrece: Episode dated 24 March 2022 (2022)
Soundtracks Sailing Written by Christopher Cross Performed by Christopher Cross Produced by Michael Omartian Courtesy of Christopher Cross Records

User reviews 1.2K

pedro380085
Mar 26, 2022
How long is Ambulance? Powered by Alexa
April 8, 2022 (United States)
United States
Grand Central Market - 317 S. Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA (Where Cam Thompson and EMT Scott stop for enchiladas and sushi, market signs and Kobe Bryant mural can be seen behind them)
Universal Pictures
Fifth Season
New Republic Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$40,000,000 (estimated)
$22,781,115
Apr 10, 2022
$52,303,589

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 16 minutes
Dolby Atmos
IMAX 6-Track

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Ambulance Is the Kind of Thrill Ride Theaters Were Made For

Ambulance , the latest from director Michael Bay, is a film powered by the jittery force of will and blissful confidence that comes with doing cocaine. Lots of cocaine. If you told me that before every swooning shot setup or bombastic line reading from co-lead Jake Gyllenhaal, people on set dived into mountains of cocaine, I would thoroughly and utterly believe you. This is exactly the kind of ridiculousness I can get behind. It deserves far more love than it got at the box office its opening weekend for putting to the fore the pleasure principle too many filmmakers in Hollywood have cast aside for self-aware quips and broadly connected universes — though I do appreciate the Ambulance characters who quote and reference previous Bay powerhouses Bad Boys and The Rock , meaning Bay exists in the universe of his own film.

Ambulance has been dubbed “small” by Bay standards because of its mid- budget cost of $40 million. For reference, his previous Netflix film, 6 Underground, starring sentient ingrown hair Ryan Reynolds, cost $150 million. But don’t let that amount of money fool you into thinking Ambulance is anything less than a deliciously profane, bonkers thrill that puts audience gratification above things like common sense and characterization. This is a film built to satisfy — teasing laughter and shock out of you at a clip. The intensity starts early. Screenwriter Chris Fedak doesn’t waste time; he efficiently sets up the crime and the trio of stars powering the narrative, relying first on amber-hued childhood flashbacks accompanied by a treacly score, then by the charisma of Gyllenhaal (playing Danny Sharp) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (playing Will Sharp) as adoptive brothers on very different sides of the law who share a harrowing adolescence thanks to their bank-robbing psychopath of a father, in whose steps the former walks. Will is at the end of his line. A war veteran and dad himself, he is desperate to get the money necessary to help his wife, Amy (Moses Ingram), pay for an experimental treatment for her hazily defined health issues. He turns to his criminal brother for a job that quickly goes left.

What starts as a secure bank robbery quickly becomes a pulsating chase through the streets of Los Angeles with the tough-broad EMT Cam (Eiza González) trying to keep alive the admittedly annoying cop (Jackson White) whom Will shot in a fit of anxiety. The film builds its twists on moments of luck and ingenuity, roping in a dazzling array of characters — from the cartel members Danny relies on to evade the authorities to FBI agent Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell), whom Danny went to college with after his father urged him to take criminal-profiling classes in order to better understand the minds that would one day be eager to thwart him. Ambulance builds its emotional life on the ragged link between Danny and Will, juxtaposing their differences at every turn. Danny is beguiling with a hair-trigger temper. Will is stoic and caring, disposed to put his life on the line for his very own hostages.

The characterization doesn’t always sing, especially when you clock the discomfiting exaltation of the armed forces that anchors the story or the fact that the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen doesn’t always hit. When Cam is introduced, it becomes clear just what kind of female character we’re faced with. She’s an EMT who can lovingly aid a young girl with a fence spoke piercing her abdomen, as the groan of metal on metal fills the air, and then want to eat enchiladas in the next breath. She’s rough-hewn and no-nonsense in that effortlessly beautiful way expected of actresses of this range — relatively young, pretty in a way that seems algorithmically designed — who have yet to prove what they can do. Here, she’s gentle when she really needs to be steely. But at its best, Ambulance is brimming with a visual brio that infuses its car crashes, chases, and bevy of explosions with delight.

The continued diminishment of mid-budget films in Hollywood in recent decades is often lamented, particularly for how integral they can be to the development and refinement of a star’s image. But much more has been lost than that. Consider the wealth of character actors in films such as the raucous Keanu Reeves action flick Speed to erotic thrillers like The Last Seduction. Bay and casting director Denise Chamian understand how to build a supporting cast. The film is colored with a variety of excellent character actors with strong turnout, especially Garret Dillahunt as the cunning police captain Monroe and Olivia Stambouliah as the electric smart-mouth Lieutenant Dzaghig, whose line readings got an enthusiastic response from my theater’s audience. Coupled with the surprisingly high body count, Ambulance hits what it needs to hit: visceral thrills, copious amounts of blood and violence (without an overreliance on shoddy CGI), practical effects, and a sincere interest in putting its characters through absolute hell. So when a Birkenstock-wearing robber gets decimated, his legs run over, only for him to look down and ask what the hell happened with the sort of nonchalance of someone acknowledging the pickles were forgotten on their burger, you can’t help but giggle. But your eyes — and the camera, guided by kinetic cinematographer Roberto De Angelis — always fall back on Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen.

As Danny, Gyllenhaal is giving hypermasculine drag. This isn’t new for him. He’s an actor who truly loves to toggle between more experimental art-house fare and big-budget extravaganzas. He’s a wry, flexible performer I have sincerely enjoyed over the decades, but whenever he’s in action of this ilk, it’s as if he needs to desperately remind us he can be a man’s man, throwing off the more feminine or complex dynamics of films such as Wildlife and Enemy , which allow him to sit within a more pluripotent masculinity. Here, Gyllenhaal is going full masc. In his hands, Danny’s charms quickly curdle into selfishness and sharp-edged violence. Still, he’s funny as hell in the role — chewing apart sentences, spitting out one-liners, using his physicality to seduce people into a state of fear, moving with ecstatic grace. He’s giving pure, unabashed gonzo energy. When he says, “It’s not that simple, Will. We’re not the bad guys,” we’re meant to look at his character warily. Yet Bay doesn’t account for the fact that more than a few in the audience of this film (myself included) couldn’t give less of a damn about the cops. It’s the criminals we root for as they flout the system and put a middle finger in the air to propriety.

On the other hand, Abdul-Mateen has been saddled with a character built together with stoicism, a good heart, and the reverence Bay clearly holds for the armed forces. Casting Abdul-Mateen in the role brings to the fore a host of interlocking issues, namely the way Black folks are forced into systems that support the very fascism and imperialism that constrain their lives on the home front. Bay doesn’t wrestle with this dynamic. Hell, he doesn’t even realize it’s there. So when it becomes clear that Danny and Will’s fate is either death or prison, the political discomfort becomes glaring. Here is a Black man trying to aid his family after the government he’s upheld discarded him only to end up a part of an even more damning system that stains this country’s hands with the blood of untold Black and brown folks. Watching Abdul-Mateen — whether he’s belting out a song with Gyllenhaal to burn off some of their anxious trepidation or punching the hell out of his onscreen brother with the sort of aplomb that immediately piques the interest of the authorities nipping at their heels — I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly he wants from his career. In HBO’s resplendent series Watchmen , he plays Doctor Manhattan with a tender heart and prowess. In the silly bombast of Aquaman , he plays my perennial favorite, Black Manta, with sneering force. More recently in Matrix Resurrections , he takes a spin on Morpheus that is self-aware and brazenly confident. He’s an actor with supremely lupine physical ingenuity, the kind of performer who walks into the room and easily charms the eye. But what rooms does he desire to walk into? What heights does he want to reach? Despite his skill and profile, Abdul-Mateen isn’t consistently taking on roles that put his power in the spotlight.

But that’s not why you’re reading this review. You’re wondering, Is Ambulance the kind of fun worth trotting out to the theater for? Hell, yeah, it is. Where do I begin? With the ecstatic color palette? The glossy reverence for a car being flipped several times in the air as if dancing of its own accord? The sheer insanity of the crashes wrought with balletic grace? How about those drone shots? Bay relies on the vertiginous joy of overhead drone shots dangling on the precipice of skyscrapers and atop other squat buildings before swooping down and tracking an eye on the cataclysmic action happening below. This swooning visual style is used again and again to great effect. Another great example of the film’s visual force? When Danny screams that Will is in fact his real brother before they unleash a hail of bullets in slo-mo on a cartel boss and his underlings, spinning in a circle to pick off their rivals. What more can be said but this: Now that’s cinema, baby.

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Ambulance review: Jake Gyllenhaal shines in explosive, chaotic action thriller

Michael bay has turned in one of the best movies of his career..

Jakes Gyllenhaal grabs Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's arm in Ambulance movie

What to Watch Verdict

Ambulance deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with explosions rattling your seat and blasting your eardrums.

Escalating tension that never lets up

Jake Gyllenhaal hams it up beautifully

Some of the best practical car crashes this side of Mad Max: Fury Road

Fetishizes police power

Camera occasionally loses track of the action

Much-maligned director Michael Bay is not entirely undeserving of his reputation as someone more interested in explosions than story, but it’s worth noting that for every Transformers he’s directed, there’s a Pain and Gain or The Rock. So consider it a welcome surprise that Ambulance somehow not only manages to avoid some of Bay’s worst impulses as a director, but actually plays into his strengths, building a tense and exciting car chase thriller around the bones of the foreign film Ambulencen, rewritten by screenwriter Chris Fedak ( Legends of Tomorrow ).

As Marine veteran Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) struggles with mounting medical bills for his wife (Moses Ingram), he turns to his criminally-enterprising brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal, in full-on neurotic shouting mode) to see if he can make a quick score and get out. It just so happens that Danny has put together a bank heist that day and Will fits in perfectly as an imposing gunman.

However, Danny’s absurdly incompetent crew ends up royally botching the job, leaving Danny and Will alone, stealing an ambulance containing an antisocial paramedic (Eiza González) and the barely-conscious cop (Jackson White) that Will inadvertently shot.

The emphasis on Will’s and Danny’s relationship and the absurdity of the heist brings the first act of the film down slightly, but once they’re in the ambulance, this becomes Michael Bay’s answer to Speed . Tension keeps ratcheting higher and higher, always pushing to the point where you think there can’t possibly be any more complications to the situation, yet things always can and inevitably will get worse for Will and Danny, especially as their brotherly bond threatens to crumble entirely.

This manifests through the frantic car chase throughout Los Angeles, but the constant struggle to keep their cop hostage alive is just as dire, if not sometimes more so with the threat of lethal police retaliation looming.

The cat-and-mouse dynamics of the chase do unfortunately play into Bay’s particularly fetishistic and uncritical appreciation of police power, but the film is so good at making the immediacy of the chase the focus of your attention there’s hardly time to think about the subtext. The mountains of practically-shot car crashes are some of the most thrilling seen in a major blockbuster since Mad Max: Fury Road and Bay’s trademark jittery camera knows how to stay still long enough that you can see every steel-twisting second of a collision.

Of course, great action needs sufficient emotional context in order to be truly effective. Thankfully Bay and Fedak do a stellar job of investing life and personality into the personas of even the most bit characters. You get glimpses into the inner lives of various police, an FBI agent, Danny’s crimelord accomplice and even Danny’s civilian employee. Their performances are punctuated by hyper-masculine banter that feels remarkably restrained for Bay, thereby making it funnier.

The biggest issue with Ambulance is sometimes the frantic camera movements can make it easy to lose track of the action during particularly harrowing scenes in the cramped confines of the emergency vehicle, but it still works as an aesthetic choice while the film continues to climb in intensity throughout.

At the end of the day, Ambulance 's minor issues can be forgiven for the sake of enjoying some truly edge-of-your-seat filmmaking, a throwback to the kinds of action films that dominated the 1990s but seem to be an increasing rarity in a world saturated with superheroes. This deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with explosions rattling your seat and blasting your eardrums. It's Michael Bay at his best, as Ambulance reminds you that when he’s on his game, he can light the world on fire.

Ambulance is now playing in the UK and opens in US theaters on April 8.

Leigh Monson has been a professional film critic and writer for six years, with bylines at Birth.Movies.Death., SlashFilm and Polygon. Attorney by day, cinephile by night and delicious snack by mid-afternoon, Leigh loves queer cinema and deconstructing genre tropes. If you like insights into recent films and love stupid puns, you can follow them on Twitter.

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Review: Can Michael Bay save the blockbuster? Nutso ‘Ambulance’ is his best in decades

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Is Michael Bay feeling OK? Has anyone checked his blood pressure recently? Offered the man a nice cup of camomile and verbena? These are legitimate questions to ask, as one emerges punch-drunk, blinded by lens flare and dripping with second-hand testosterone transfer, from “Ambulance,” his latest — and by the standards of his 2000s output, best — assault on the occipital lobe.

Just to watch this deliriously dumb actioner is an amber-threat-level event best avoided by those with pacemakers or PhDs; imagine actually making it. Probably wise that it is set in the titular emergency response vehicle, ensuring easy access during shooting to defibrilllators and tongue depressors. Because the issue of Bay continuing in the rudest of health is not merely idle chit-chat. With this noisy, nonsensical, nutso movie careening, crazy-eyed onto a cinematic freeway otherwise choked with interchangeably airless superhero properties, this most inessential of blockbuster filmmakers has suddenly proved himself weirdly valuable. Mr. Bay , please get your thyroid checked out, because apparently, we need you.

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“Ambulance” is based on a Danish thriller, in the sense that Bay has taken that film’s lean little premise — about bank-robbing brothers commandeering an ambulance that also contains an EMT and her dying patient — put it on a protein-and-steroid diet and sent it to the gym to bulk up till its veins pop.

Less care was taken beefing up the screenplay (adapted by Chris Fedak), but one hardly comes to a Michael Bay movie for the Wildean wordplay. To give you some idea, the wittiest exchange (apart from a genuinely delightful interlude scored to Christopher Cross’ “Sailing) is a labored bit about one of the heist crew (Devan Chandler Long) looking so like “Braveheart”-era Mel Gibson that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Danny insists on calling him “Mel Gibson.” It’s particularly baffling given Long looks nothing like Gibson, and is actually a ringer for MMA fighter Conor McGregor, but that would be a reference too up-to-date for “Ambulance,” which, even when it refers immodestly to Bay’s own back catalogue, name checks “The Rock” and “Bad Boys” rather than anything from this millennium.

Danny is the wildcard adoptive brother of straight-edged Army vet Will ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , making light work of a rather 2D good-guy role), whose wife is in dire need of a life-saving treatment, which their health insurance will not cover.

Thus Will turns to Danny on the very day — wouldn’t you know it — that Danny is planning to rob a local bank and is one man short for the job. By appealing to their shared past (the Will-Danny relationship is steeped in brotherly Baythos, and damned if it doesn’t kind of work) Will gets talked into it, but the heist goes awry early when lovelorn Officer Zach (Jackson White) pushes his way into the bank at exactly the wrong moment and gets shot for his trouble. Luckily for him, unfeasibly attractive EMT Cam ( Eiza Gonzalez ), a.k.a. the “best paramedic in town” — and certainly the one with the most unsmudgeably luscious lipgloss — is nearby, but when Danny and Will need a getaway vehicle for themselves and all their stolen money, they commandeer her ambulance with Cam and a dying Zach still in it.

Cam — gratifyingly, by some distance the least ogled of Bay’s female leads — valiantly tries to keep Zach alive, which Danny and Will soon realize is in their best interests too: The pursing police, led by Garret Dillahunt’s Capt. Monroe and Keir O’Donnell’s FBI Agent Clark, are much less likely to simply blow the vehicle up if they know that “one of their own” is alive inside it.

Don’t worry if this makes “Ambulance” sound a bit copagandist — you’d be hard pushed to find a coherent political agenda in a movie this anarchically dedicated to ensuring no one scene has any bearing on the one that came before. It’s weird that a film so thuddingly simplistic in its two-hour-plus arc should be so utterly mystifying on a moment-to-moment basis, but that’s “Bayhem” for ya.

A man grabs the arm of another man holding a rifle in the movie “Ambulance”

There’s a lot of zooming about (it’s never exactly clear where to) as medical complications ensure Cam has to improvise a grisly surgery on the go, Will has to give blood while driving and Danny has to shout and bug his eyes a lot (which Gyllenhaal is great at, like a very handsome Angry Bird). A whole lot more characters are briefly introduced, given one defining characteristic, like “wears Birkenstocks,” “is gay,” “has a dog” or “constantly bitches about his wife” and then just as quickly dispensed with. But then, mostly the actors seem hired less for their roles than for their agility in stepping nimbly away when one of Bay and director of photography Roberto De Angelis’ drone-mounted cameras comes barreling at them with the unstoppable force of a surface-to-air missile.

But as lunatic as the filmmaking is, and as much as Bay’s style tries to divorce it from actual physics entirely, it’s also reassuringly real: There’s something almost quaint about knowing that when the battered van is speeding down the concrete channels of the L.A. River, being pursued by two police choppers and a kamikaze squadron of police cars, they are actual vehicles, going actually fast in an actual place. It’s so nice to see money inexcusably wasted this way, rather than on the inflated salaries of movie stars halfway through their nine-picture contracts, waving their arms around in front of a green screen. The CGI here is minimal, and Bay recently clarified comments he made about its quality, saying there are, in fact, only two shots he doesn’t like in the whole movie. Two! Considering it contains roughly 12 billion shots, that’s a pretty good average.

So “Ambulance” is not good, exactly. Still it is an enjoyable, oddly inspiring reminder of how many more flavors not-good used to come in, in the olden days, back when we had the luxury of regarding Michael Bay’s brand of adrenalized, lobotomized moviemaking as a menace to blockbuster cinema, rather than — gulp — one of its potential saviors.

'Ambulance'

Rated: R, for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: In general release

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Ambulance review: Michael Bay and Jake Gyllenhaal’s movie mayhem escapes the mortuary

The need for speed has always fuelled Michael Bay’s work. That, along with a borderline-psychotic interest in explosions, sunsets, American flags and military know-how. All those elements are present and correct in this (disarming) doodle of a movie, shot during the pandemic.

Noble but hard-up ex-marine Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) agrees to help his hot-headed, Mexican-mafia-connected adopted brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) with a heist that – d’urh! - goes wrong. Will is so loyal to his brother that he’s willing to shoot a cop but the brothers’ love for one another is repeatedly tested as they try to escape the SIS and FBI in a commandeered ambulance which happens to contains the aforementioned cop, plus a resourceful, cynical and beauteous paramedic, Cam (Eiza Gonzalez). Still with me?

The plot is all hairpin turns and anyone with a normal attention span will be driven mad within the first few minutes. Speaking of which, if you’ll permit a brief digression, a funny thing happened at the premiere. Bay was in attendance and decided that instead of jetting off to his next cool appointment, he’d watch Ambulance with the audience, like a regular guy. By the time he had this genius idea, the film had already started. Also, he had a few phone calls to make. So the film had to be stopped - and we just had to sit there, twiddling our popcorn - while he took care of business. Then the film began again. From the beginning. Clearly, the 57 year old director is the kind of man who has so many flunkeys that he thinks everyone is on his payroll.

And that he does stuff because, well, he can is obvious from Ambulance itself. Drones offer pointless povs. Pointless, that is, unless you’ve always wondered what LA looks like to a demented seagull. Bay’s a master, though, when it comes to whipping up tension on the ground. Cam’s attempt to remove a bullet from the cop’s gut is marvellously squelchy and an ambush featuring a dummy and a gatling gun is bodacious. Some of the jokes are clever and knowing and as for Gonzalez, this competent actress gets to keep her clothes on and avoid porny poses (unlike The Transformers’ Megan Fox, she of the permanently arched back). Meanwhile, Candyman’s Abdul-Mateen II shines. He was nothing more than a clothes horse in The Matrix Resurrections, but is hypnotically naturalistic as the pensive, conflicted Will.

There’s also a huge jowly dog called Nitro, who has charisma up the whazoo and doesn’t get the ending you might expect (this moral maze is full of intriguing dead ends).

Where does that leave Gyllenhaal?

“He starred in a Michael Bay movie called Ambulance” could be a caustic line from a song by Gyllenhaal’s ex, Taylor Swift. Jake used to be more famous than Tay Tay, but those days are gone. He now seems happy to play supporting roles in blockbusters (such as Spider-Man: Far from Home ) and mooch along in anything else that comes along. Luckily for us, he’s a top-notch moocher and the B-movie he and Bay have cobbled together is genuinely diverting. Yep, once our sort of heroes get behind the wheel of that ambulance, a project that seemed destined for the sick-bay perks right up.

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‘Ambulance’ Review: A Mind-Numbing, Explosion-Laden ‘Speed’ Knockoff Only Michael Bay Could Make

Carlos aguilar.

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Loud macho bravado oozes from each explosion-laden, mind-numbing, testosterone-overdosing shot in the grossly expensive — and often quite lucrative — filmography of primo bro director Michael Bay . While his previous empty-headed action debacle, “6 Underground,” debuted on Netflix to little fanfare in 2019, Bay’s newest big-screen entry into his pro-military, pro-police, and pro-outdated masculinity oeuvre, “ Ambulance ,” comes as an attempt at something quasi-reflective best summarized as “Speed” told with an awfully blatant Blue Lives Matter angle.

“Nobody gets to kill a cop,” earnestly proclaims camo-pants-wearing Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), about the core reason for the bombastic chase in and around downtown Los Angeles at the center of this heroes-and-robbers movie. This is the man behind the terrible “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” so that the entire plot of this one hinges on the city moving heaven and earth to rescue a naïve policeman seems on brand.

But Bay, not a scribe, can’t get to these atrocious narrative concoctions on his own. For “Ambulance,” screenwriter Chris Fedak adapted the premise from a 2005 Danish film of the same title by writer-director Laurits Munch-Petersen. Changes for Fedak’s American version include highlighting the City of Angels’ geography, a multicultural cast, and, of course, the bootlicking praise for authority paramount to certain conservative ideologies.

Curiously, Jake Gyllenhaal , playing mischievously charming career criminal Danny, appears to have an affinity for English-language remakes of Danish hits about law enforcement or the military, as last year’s “The Guilty” or 2009’s “Brothers” can attest. Unfortunately, the Denmark-to-Gyllenhaal pipeline continues to disappoint.

Before getting to the life-saving vehicle of the title, cashmere-clad Danny ropes his adoptive brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a disillusioned war veteran struggling financially, into the cliched notion of “one last job.” Eye-roll-inducing flashbacks to the pair’s childhood point to a rough upbringing in the harsh streets of the California metropolis. But don’t expect their bond to go much deeper than a basic “I love you, bro.”

The dynamics of their household growing up with a lawbreaking father or the difference in their life experience based on race won’t get acknowledged. Vulnerability would evidently eat time away from the many cars that will crash, flip, and burn during their ordeal. In need of cash to pay for his wife’s medical treatment, Will agrees to rob a federal bank with Danny and his crew, but the plan goes awry, and, in the heat of their escape, he shoots a rookie officer, Zach (Jackson White), to protect Danny. Luckily for them, the wound isn’t fatal.

As shootouts and fast-paced mayhem unfolds around them, stoic EMT Cam (Eiza González) arrives at the scene to transport Zach to a hospital. Thanks to a convenient twist of timing and fate; however, Danny and Will take Cam’s ambulance at gunpoint, and in turn her and Zach as hostages, for a relentless odyssey flooring it across freeways and alleyways.

Throughout the predictable but still heart-pounding pursue, the camera pirouettes through the air capturing imposing footage of the skyline up-close or of the violent confrontations on wheels — at times going under a police car about to turn into a wreck or tracking the ambulance at full speed. There’s a brisk agility to the images that reiterate the unstoppable and lethal march of the situation. Overall, Roberto De Angelis’ cinematography maintains the intensity in this long ride balancing frantic closeups of the distressed faces of those in the thick of it and the aerial views that expose the larger-picture urban damage occurring.

One sequence involving helicopters and the ambulance dashing through water on the LA River in slow-motion feels uniquely exhilarating and grand as it’s crafted with the brute impetus of “Mad Max: Fury Road” set piece. Sonically though, one could almost bet that the instruction composer Lorne Balfe received from Bay for the score of “Ambulance” was to copy the marching band sounds pertinent to a Marines or Army recruiting commercial.

If nothing else, “Ambulance” thrives on its potent sense of place making the city of Los Angeles prominent in every frame, even if Bay likely chose the downtown area to bank on its grittiness and decay. Philosophically, it speaks of a lawless place to which — the film seems to insinuate — only the police and its law-abiding allies can bring light to. But in witnessing the lengths to which institutions will go to save one of their “boys in blue” inevitably makes one wonder if the LAPD’s unending budget, even in this fictional space, could be allocated towards the very issues that push Will to accept the illicit gig.

Fedak peppers in LA-specific jabs at the audacity of transplants who claim to know the city better than native Angelenos and white people who won’t go anywhere west of downtown, where predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods are. Likewise, the writer embeds some of the many supporting characters with personality traits that brim with insincerity. Halfway through, he introduces a gay character that solely exists to perpetuate the toxic traits of his straight counterparts, such as dismissing his partner’s mental health concerns.

Inside the vehicle, Gonzalez mines this role to infuse the picture with its most memorable performance, as a stone-faced woman, who’s managed to separate her high-stress career from her personal life, but now faces a moral quandary: saving herself or the lives of others. May this become just a steppingstone toward better parts.

A manic Gyllenhaal, constantly screaming, seems in line with characters the actor has delivered as of late. While infused with comic relief from time to time, Gyllenhaal’s work in “Ambulance,” as the stubborn older brother who doesn’t know when to quit, misuses his ability for greater complexity in playing ambivalent persona (think of “Nightcrawler”). Abdul-Mateen, the valiant knight of the tale, plays along in the perpetually tense scenario as the getaway driver with a solid moral compass, but his appearances are mostly reduced to some outburst of physicality and ultimately to simplistic sainthood.

And that’s precisely one of biggest sins of “Ambulance,” because when all it’s said and done, what it implies is that the only Black characters on screen have value because they are on the “right side of the system.” Will went to war for this country and is only stealing for a good cause, while officer Mark (Cedric Sanders), Zach’s partner, is bent on avenging him. At every turn, Bay’s choices, in the characters’ dialogue and how each of them is treated on screen, makes it crystal clear that only those that play by the rules deserve any compassion.

Likewise, Bay and Fedak don’t miss their chance to portray Latinos as one-dimensional gang members, which brings up an important point: we need a full investigation on white directors’ perverse fascination with La Santa Muerte, the skeletal deity now associated with the occult, that repeatedly appears as a motif of otherworldly exoticism around Mexican characters or their vision of the cartel. (David Ayer’s “The Tax Collector” and “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” are other recent examples.)

For all that doesn’t work in this overstuffed parade of collisions with simplistically conceived protagonists, what irks most is that Bay tries to pass it off as some of sort of profound humanistic à la statement a la “Crash.” Whatever semblance of progressiveness or call for unity he tries to invoke here, probably studio-mandated or strategically placed, comes off as far more insulting than if he were to just make his ridiculous movies completely devoid of any intent for conveying a message. Bay’s latest reeks of falsehood veiled as righteousness.

A Universal release, “Ambulance” will be in theaters on Friday, April 8.

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‘Ambulance’ Is More Than Just One of Michael Bay’s Best Movies, It’s One of His Most Human

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The Big Picture

"Ambulance" is Michael Bay's best movie in ages, showcasing maturity and growth from the director known for his explosive blockbusters.
The film is centered around the bond between flawed characters, played brilliantly by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eiza González.
Bay's signature style is more impactful when he distances himself from his typical nihilism, resulting in a movie with real emotional depth and a surprising ending.

If one were to judge a movie solely from its trailers, then Ambulance , Michael Bay ’s latest, checks plenty of the boxes in regard to what exactly a Michael Bay film should theoretically look like in 2022. Plenty of awe-inspiring explosions? Check. Characters shouting? Check. Cars going really, really fast? Most certainly, check (the movie is called Ambulance for a reason). Militarized law enforcement squadrons storming one of the director’s glossy frames as the American flag billows softly in the background? Check and check.

Alas, there are surprises in store for anyone buying a ticket to Ambulance expecting more of the same old Bayhem. For one, Ambulance is easily Bay’s best movie in ages – arguably since his lizard-brained masterwork Bad Boys II , and maybe even since The Rock . The film, while far from a lean, economical affair, is also agreeably scaled back for this famously maximalist director. There are no Transformers (thankfully), and no finales in which American cities are reduced to dust, though the freeways of Los Angeles do admittedly take quite a beating. The movie is also almost entirely free of Bay’s tendencies towards toxicity: blessedly bereft of cringe-inducing racist jokes and the director's leering gaze, Ambulance emerges as, without question, Bay’s most human film to date. Dare we say, it's almost mature by his standards.

'Ambulance' Shows Maturity and Growth From Michael Bay

For a movie that’s pretty much two-plus hours of nonstop forward motion, Ambulance begins quietly. The first image we see is of a young boy, William Sharp, played masterfully as an adult by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II . Young Will is seen traversing the inhospitable yet vibrant streets of his native Los Angeles alongside his adopted brother Danny, played as an adult by a live-wire Jake Gyllenhaal . As Bay cuts to the modern-day, he presents a similarly subdued, earnest scene wherein the grown-up Will pleads with an insurance supervisor to cut him a break on his wife’s costly experimental surgery, an act that ultimately kicks the movie’s plot into gear. Even before the action of Ambulance begins in earnest, Bay already has us believing in these flawed, fraught men and their lifelong bond.

RELATED: 'Ambulance' Ending Explained: Violence, Death and Redemption

Granted, the setup of the central pair’s battle-tested friendship is just a few shades away from feeling like a screenwriter’s cliché: Danny, under the tutelage of his psychotic criminal father, eventually drifted into a life of crime, while Will opted to enlist in the military. Still, Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen are never anything less than electric when they’re on-screen together, each actor pouring a lifetime’s worth of resentments and regrets into Bay’s typically frenetic dialogue exchanges.

Ambulance kicks into gear, narratively speaking, when Danny enlists Will in a $32-million bank heist that will help pay for his wife’s surgery. Of course, the sting goes sideways, our bad-boy brothers hijack an ambulance that’s being occupied by the city’s toughest EMT ( Eiza González ), and it all leads to a jaw-dropping, remarkably sustained car chase that comprises roughly 90% of the rest of the movie.

Another sign of maturation in Ambulance relates to how Bay stages his notoriously overblown set pieces. For once, there’s a sense of moral weight to the human lives caught in the director's violent fray. The eardrum-splitting shootout that occurs outside the bank just after the robbery isn’t entertaining or fun: it’s horrifying, in spite of being filmed with all of Bay’s typical technical panache. Something tells us that’s exactly how the director wanted it.

Unlike in, say, Bad Boys II or 6 Underground – where the viewer is invited to chuckle in glib defiance at the casual destruction on display, here, Bay takes no pleasure in the collateral damage wrought by his increasingly desperate central characters. For once, he actually seems kind of appalled by all the chaos. That's not to say some of said chaos isn't intended to be fun, but it never, not once, feels frivolous. As silly as the movie can be, the stakes are never anything less than life-or-death in a very literal sense.

Unlike Many Other Bay Films, 'Ambulance' Relies on Its Characters

Ambulance simply wouldn’t work at all if we didn’t care about Danny, Will, or González's endlessly resourceful EMT, who is revealed to be as much of a complex, developed character as either of her co-stars. As the ambulance chase itself starts to take on a kind of demented cartoon logic (think Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, only with enough explosive firepower to bring the City of Angels to its knees), the character’s despair, and their purely animal instinct to stay alive at all costs (Danny is frequently assuring Will that they will both find their way home, a refrain that becomes more poignant and woefully unconvincing each new time we hear it) eventually becomes the movie’s most compelling special effect.

Bay, like his friend and mentor Steven Spielberg , has frequently trafficked in archetypes. This changes in Ambulance , where the three dynamic, deeply multifaceted, often very funny performances from our trio of leads end up transcending the sometimes broad strokes of Chris Fedak’s otherwise airtight script. Gyllenhaal can do bugged-out, hyperactive intensity better than just about any other actor his age, and he gives himself up so beautifully to Bay’s unhinged macho world. After Danny’s first few introductory story beats, there isn’t a scene where his character isn’t screaming at the top of his lungs, to the point that one begins to wonder why he and Bay had yet to work together before this.

If anything, Abdul-Mateen and González are tied for the role of the film's MVP. Abdul-Mateen put his own unique and compelling spin on iconic characters in HBO's Watchmen , as well as last year’s The Matrix Resurrections , and the actor’s winning streak continues here. Any time he’s on-screen, Abdul-Mateen imbues Ambulance with a gravitas that elevates this to the top tier of Bay’s body of work. González is saddled with an even trickier part, and yet she manages to nail beats of comedy, tension, and pathos with the finesse of a screen pro twice her age. In the end, the actress is allowed to do much more in this boy’s club milieu than she was in the likes of Hobbs & Shaw or Baby Driver , and a deliciously squeamish interlude where her character FaceTimes a pair of understandably baffled trauma surgeons to talk her through surgery as the ambulance does 60 mph is in the running for one of 2022’s more purely thrilling standalone sequences.

Even this aforementioned scene would not feel as exciting as it does if something real, something human , weren’t at stake. Sure, Ambulance has dive-bombing drone shots, Garrett Dillahunt as a wisecracking cop with an enormous dog named Nitro, and a sequence in which an armed lowrider attacks a group of cops. Ambulance is an absolutely insane movie, light years away from what any normal person might consider “reality,” and yet, it comes packaged with a real, beating heart all the same.

In prior Bay films, we’ve rarely been invited to actually care about the characters. More often than not, they have been sexy human window dressing for the onslaught of beautiful carnage that the Bay-heads came to see. What the director ends up proving with Ambulance is that his signature style is actually a great deal more effective when he distances himself from the nose-thumbing nihilism that has sometimes defined his oeuvre (see: Armageddon and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi , two of Bay’s more sincere movies, and also two of his better ones).

'Ambulance' Builds to an Emotional End

ambulance-trailer-yahya-abdul-mateen-ii-social-featured

Ambulance’s emotional apex occurs between its second and third act, as Danny and Will aim to find some fleeting respite in the midst of what has been an otherwise extremely stressful day. Danny, emphasizing that he needs to “chill out,” starts listening to Christopher Cross’s yacht rock staple, “Sailing.” Naturally, Will joins along. This light, cheeky interval is indeed played for a laugh: how could it not be? The scene is also a much-needed breather from the relentless barrage of pure adrenaline the audience has been put through up until that point. Yet, if one stops to parse the lyrics of the song itself, they seem to be speaking to Will and Danny’s shared plight on a kind of cosmic level:

"Well, it's not far down to paradise,

At least it's not for me.

And if the wind is right you can sail away,

And find tranquility."

Will and Danny’s great escape is on the horizon. We've been there with them every nerve-wracking step of the way. All the pair has to do is keep pushing forward—which is appropriate, since Danny's stated ethos throughout the chase is “we don’t stop.” Even the chorus of the Cross tune, which our lead pair proceed to sing with boyish zeal, alludes to feeling liberated of society’s shackles: of being truly, and unquestionably free:

"Sailing,

Takes me away to where I've always heard it could be.

Just a dream and the wind to carry me,

Soon I will be free."

We want to believe that these adopted brothers will someday find their paradise. We want to believe that one day, soon, they will both be free, that they’ll both get to go home.

It doesn't end that way. For hard cases like Danny and Will, it never does. That their situation ends tragically should come as no surprise. What does come as a surprise is the act of holding back honest-to-goodness tears near the end of a Michael Bay movie. In fact, it's more than just a welcome shock: it's cinematic.

Movie Features
Eiza Gonzalez

Ambulance Ending Explained: No Heroes, No Villains

Human society can be seen as one big extension of the internal systems keeping every one of us alive: an intricate, interwoven series of organisms with specialized functions that need to work in concert with each other to serve the whole. The big difference is that white blood cells and proteins and the like don't have individual sentience, whereas every living person keeping a place running — like, say, a major city — is faced with the problem of choice each day.

" Ambulance ," the new film from director Michael Bay and writer Chris Fedak, has its title stylized in both its advertising materials and the film's end credits to highlight the "LA" in the middle of the word, emphasizing the importance and prominence of the movie's location: the city of Los Angeles. While an inordinate number of movies like to claim that their locations are "like another character" in their films, "Ambulance's" emphasis on its urban setting is well earned.

As Fedak explains via a press kit from Universal, "I fell in love with writing 'Ambulance' because the story allowed me to make it about real people," and that despite the movie's non-stop, large-scale action, "it was still an intimate story, primarily about three characters." Those three principal characters represent a cross-section of LA's citizenry, people whose choices organically affect the lives of everyone around them. With Fedak and Bay's interest in approaching the film from a macro perspective (figuratively and also literally, with regard to the cinematography), "Ambulance" becomes a remarkably nuanced and empathetic movie where the heroes and villains are not so clear-cut.

Lending a helping (and healing) hand

"Ambulance" is based on a 2005 Danish film, "Ambulancen," and that movie also features a combination of action and suspense with a series of moral character dilemmas. However, where that film was more intimate, Bay and Fedak's "Ambulance" expands to include nearly the entire city of LA, with the three principals at the heart of the conflict.

Those three characters are Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), his brother by adoption Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), and LA County paramedic Cam Thompson (Eiza González), all of whom are stuck for most of the film in the titular ambulance when the brothers commandeer it after a bank robbery gone wrong. The mostly unconscious but still barely alive fourth passenger is a rookie cop fresh from the academy, Zach (Jackson White), who is bleeding out from gunshots fired by Will in a scuffle during the robbery.

Following a long and harrowing chase around LA, the ambulance finally finds itself driven right up to the emergency room entrance of a hospital by Danny in a frantic attempt to save Will's life after he'd been accidentally shot by Cam. When Cam confesses her mistake, Danny becomes enraged, attempting to force the mobilized LAPD and FBI units outside to stand down long enough for him to emerge from the vehicle and murder Cam in front of everyone, knowing it'll mean his own death soon after. As he steps out of the vehicle, Danny is shot from behind by a still conscious Will, the two brothers sharing a final look as Danny dies and Will is arrested.

After Agent Clark (Keir O'Donnell) attempts to dissuade a now freed Cam from helping her former captor, Cam pushes through a crowd to help Will into the hospital, and then surreptitiously sneaks a few million dollars from the robbery into the possession of Will's wife, Amy (Moses Ingram). As Will heals from his wounds in the hospital under police custody, Officer Zach makes a statement that Will saved his life while Cam visits the bed of a little girl, Lindsey (Briella Guiza), whose life she saved before she was taken hostage.

1970s characterizations meets 'Bayhem'

The official press notes for the film reference a number of 1970s thrillers as primary influences on "Ambulance," including such classics as "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" and "Dog Day Afternoon." Impressively, "Ambulance" captures the way those films portrayed their characters with grit, nuance, and complexity, refusing to demonize or lionize anyone. While Fedak's script is often on the nose when it comes to relaying information about these people and their motivations, the ethical dilemmas each of them face are never given obvious or easy answers. In "Ambulance," just as in those '70s films, characters committing criminal acts have deeply empathetic reasons for their actions, just as characters on the side of law and order don't always have the best interests of others at heart.

If the movie is frequently shouting things that would go down easier more naturalistically, it's because "Ambulance" presents the peanut-butter-and-chocolate-esque delight of having complex characters be suddenly caught up in, well, a Michael Bay film. Shot for just $40 million as a way for the director to make a small movie during the pandemic—let me restate that for emphasis: Bay's version of "small" is a film where entire swathes of vehicles are crashed and exploded — "Ambulance" endorses Danny and Will's credo of "we don't stop," moving like a bat out of hell as soon as things begin to go south. This gives Bay license to unleash his signature "Bayhem," a cinema of excess so recognizable by this point it's become the subject of this Every Frame a Painting analysis, not to mention a part of /Film's review of the movie.

Director of photography Roberto De Angelis, in conjunction with Bay, utilizes a mixture of mobile camera cranes, helicopters, and drones to fling the camera around in a fashion that would make Sam Raimi blush, reflecting the life-and-death stakes of the characters visually at all times. Bay ensures that although the story is intimate, the palette is constantly looking at the big picture, the film's ensemble and the city of LA never far from frame. While explosions occur by the minute and Danny, Will and Cam's plight is the focus, everything is connected, and everyone has their own perspective.

An advertisement for understanding

The key to unlocking — if not necessarily appreciating — Bay as a filmmaker is knowing that he got his start directing commercials, and that he is a consummate commercial director. Bay is a master at delivering a flurry of information in a compressed amount of time (witness the genius of his famous "Got Milk?" commercial ), which is why his feature-length movies tend to feel exhausting and overstuffed. His knack for the sell extends not just to copious amounts of unabashed product placement in his films but to his entire aesthetic, making sure that every actor on screen is as beautiful as possible and every emotional beat is wrung dry.

While Bay has never switched up this style and likely never will, one of the things that makes "Ambulance" so unique and exciting is the way he applies it to a story that invites empathy, nuance, and debate. Every character's storyline is resolved, yet the ambiguity surrounding their choices and how the audience is meant to view them remains. Since he can't easily label such characters "good" and "bad," Bay instead sells them on their own terms: Danny pays for his transgressions yet dies truly loving his brother, Will crosses any line in order to selflessly save another, and Cam realizes that the job of saving lives can extend beyond rigid parameters.

In this way, "Ambulance" becomes an advertisement for understanding, an honestly and sadly radical notion in a post-Trump, current-pandemic, and near-world-war climate. While the film's final shot closely resembles a recruitment video for EMTs, it's not a job that Bay is selling so much as Cam herself, the movie recognizing her heroism in dedicating her life to helping others despite her blemished past. Of course, the real final shot is of Los Angeles, the city the film depicts, the place where all these people and more have to try and live together and help each other. Bay's prior films have traditionally depicted the military as one monolithic force for good, but here the forces of authority are called into question. It's not institutions or systems we should put our faith in, "Ambulance" says, but individuals. If the human organism is going to be saved, then we all have to do our part.

Ambulance Review

25 Mar 2022

Ambulance (2022)

Michael Bay ‘going small’ is everyone else’s ‘going absolutely bloody massive’. Ambulance , the action specialist’s 15th feature film, was trumpeted as a return to the director’s roots, shot rapidly in the summer of 2020 on a fraction of the budget he usually plays with. His roots, of course, were hardly subtle affairs, and neither is Ambulance — but it’s the closest to his career-high, The Rock , that he’s been in years.

After the self-indulgent misfire of his last film, 6 Underground , this is a cracking example of how Bayhem can work (to an extent) within some tight parameters. The straightforward premise, taken from the Danish film of the same name, is sound: two brothers, one of good heart ( Yahya Abdul-Mateen II , on steadfast form), one near-psychopathic ( Jake Gyllenhaal , on deranged form), one paramedic hostage ( Eiza González , the grown-up in the room), and one ambulance, versus the entire LAPD. On paper it’s about a bank heist, but the film rattles through that part fairly quickly, because this is to its core a chase movie; like Speed before it, it takes the concrete highways of Los Angeles as its grand stage.

Almost reassuringly, Bay’s hallmarks are still here. Golden hour is still 24 hours long. Clichéd dialogue still abounds (“Nobody knows this city better than you!”). Bay has still never met a lens he doesn’t want to flare. Anything that can explode probably still will. But he’s added some new feathers to his cap: in an audaciously meta move, Michael Bay characters are now able to reference and even quote previous Michael Bay films; his camera is nowhere near as sleazy as it once was; and spiralling drone shots give his frame dizzying new perspectives.

At times you will wonder how the hell a camera even fitted between the congruence of speeding metal and conflagrations.

Those acrobatic angles, in fact, add an entirely new dimension to Bay’s action, and the action is really the only reason we’re all here. At times you will wonder how the hell a camera even fitted between the congruence of speeding metal and conflagrations. The pace, meanwhile, is relentless and white-knuckle. “We’re locomotives,” screams Gyllenhaal’s character at one point, “we don’t stop” — which really sounds like Bay describing his own work ethic. Lord knows how a man approaching 60 can keep these energy levels up.

It’s by no means always coherent: that relentless pursuit of pace often results in hard-to-follow editing, and the director seems to share the same philosophy towards sound-mixing as Christopher Nolan, with sonic fury sometimes prioritised over audibility. Much of the film pays serious respect to police militarisation, too, which seems out of step with the mood of America. And a lot of it is just tremendously silly: a farting dog is a key plot point, while someone yells at a crucial moment about their cashmere jumper.

It doesn’t all work. But when the sirens are blaring at their best, it is a reminder of why nobody does bold, brash, bonkers blockbusting quite as thrillingly — or loudly — as Bay.

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Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal in Ambulance

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DVD & Streaming
Action/Adventure , Crime , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

April 8, 2022
Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp; Eiza González as Cam Thompson; Garret Dillahunt as Captain Monroe; Keir O’Donnell as FBI Agent Anson Clark; Jackson White as Officer Zach; Olivia Stambouliah as Lieutenant Dzaghig; Moses Ingram as Amy Sharp; Colin Woodell as EMT Scott; Cedric Sanders as Officer Mark; A Martinez as Papi; Jesse Garcia as Roberto

Home Release Date

April 29, 2022
Michael Bay

Distributor

Universal Pictures

Movie Review

It was supposed to be easy.

In and out, a one-off, and they would soon be $32 million richer.

It wasn’t Danny Sharp’s first time robbing a bank. Actually, it was his 38 th time. And his father had been a notoriously effective thief, too. Danny had planned this heist down to the most minute detail to make it go as smoothly as the rest of them had gone. At the last minute, he’d even recruited the help of his adoptive brother Will, an unemployed Purple Heart veteran who desperately needs money to pay for his wife’s surgery.

But what wasn’t part of Danny’s plan was taking Zach, a police officer who showed up on that bank to ask a pretty teller out, hostage. And what definitely wasn’t part of the plan was Will shooting Officer Zach. Because if they kill a police officer, Danny and Will just signed their death warrant.

And as their plan falls apart as the bank is swarmed by law enforcement, the cornered Danny and Will choose their last option: hijacking an ambulance—the one that just so happens to be carrying the dying Zach and EMT Cam Thompson to the hospital. With their unintentional hostages in the back and cop cars quickly closing in on them, Danny tells Cam to keep Zach alive—or he’ll make sure she quickly joins him in the afterlife.

As the list of criminal charges against Danny and Will grows by the second, and as explosions dot the Los Angeles landscape wherever their careening ambulance goes, it’s looking more and more likely that none of them will be walking away from this one.

But that prospect doesn’t deter Danny Sharp. “We’re Sharp,” he says. “We don’t stop.”

Positive Elements

As an EMT, Cam deals with horrible things on a daily basis … and she’s become numb to it. She tells her newbie partner that the worst day in the life of the people she’s helping is just another hour in her work week. That, she implies, is what enables her to keep the emotional distance to do her job very effectively—such as when she helps keeps a little girl alive who’s been impaled by a piece of fence in a horrific car accident.

But when Cam gets kidnapped by Danny and Will and is thrust into her own worst day of her life, she learns that she doesn’t need to repress her emotions. She’s allowed to cry, and she doesn’t have to be the tough one all the time. That said, she’s still pretty tough throughout most of her hostage ordeal—during which she works mightily to keep Officer Zach alive. She also begins to develop sympathy for Will, whom she realizes has made some of his terrible choices for the sake of trying to support his wife’s medical needs.

Though we cannot approve of Will agreeing to rob a bank nor many of his actions within the film, the movie makes it clear that Will genuinely wants to do things the right way. He doesn’t want to be the bad guy. He wants to be able to pay for his wife’s surgery, and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone—often being the voice of reason to his erratic, megalomaniac brother. The majority of his immoral decisions are due to Danny’s incessant pressuring, bullying and manipulation. Over the course of the film, Will’s loyalties begin to shift from his brother to protecting Cam and Officer Zach.

When a police officer gets blamed for failing to stop a bank robbery, the captain of the team steps up and takes responsibility for the mistake, explaining that it was his own call, so it’s his own fault.

The police force as a whole works as diligently as possible to stop Danny and Will from inflicting further injury, as well as in trying to save the two hostages onboard the hijacked ambulance.

Spiritual Elements

A man says “God bless you.” We see a homemade wooden cross. Another man wears cross earrings and has statues depicting angels. Danny prays silently.

Sexual & Romantic Content

FBI Agent Clark is gay, and we see him in counseling with his husband. They kiss, though his husband is never seen nor referenced afterwards.

Will and his wife, Amy, kiss. Zach and another police officer talk about Zach asking a woman out on a date. Danny says he has herpes.

Violent Content

Michael Bay has a multidecade reputation for directing and producing movies filled with explosions and violence, including Transformers , The Purge and Armageddon . Ambulance continues that craft with ample blood, gore and fiery explosions. In general, many cars crash, myriads of bullets are fired, pints of blood paint Los Angeles red, and people die.

Cam and her EMT partner arrive to a gruesome car crash, and they pull a bloody woman out of a wrecked car. Cam holds the hand of a young girl in the car whose stomach is pierced by a piece of a metal fence. Later, Cam is forced to operate on Zach, and we watch as she cuts open his stomach and sticks her hand deep into his abdominal wound, feeling around for a bullet. We see Zach’s internal organs, and we watch his spleen burst. Zach wakes up during the surgery, and Will has to knock him out.

Cam sprays Danny and Will with a fire extinguisher. Danny knocks an EMT unconscious with a gun, and he frequently shoots at police officers, though his aim is as poor as his plan. Danny and Will gun down a group of gang members. Danny and Will fight one another in the ambulance. Danny forcefully slams Cam down in the ambulance, and he attempts to shoot her. He also grabs Cam by the throat, and Cam uses a defibrillator on him to fight back. He threatens many people with guns, and he is said to have robbed 38 banks. Danny and Will are shot at by snipers and police continually.

Will shoots Zach and eventually takes him hostage. He speeds down the streets of Los Angeles for nearly the entirety of this movie. Will swerves his ambulance to cause people in the back of it to fall over. He also assists Cam in operating on Zach.

During the bank robbery and subsequent gunfight, a man is hit by a moving truck, and we see his leg bent in an unnatural way as he bleeds to death. Another man is graphically shot through the head, and yet another is seen shot to death.

In the car chases, countless cop cars crash, sometimes in spectacular fashion, causing us to wonder if any passengers could have possibly survived. Two police cars crash into cinderblocks. Another car careens off a steep hill. They crash through fruit stands, into one another and are shot up.

In another fight, gang members rig a vehicle with C4 explosives, and they detonate it amid a group of police officers; it’s clear many are severely injured. The same gang members also use a remote-operated vehicle with a massive machine gun to shoot at police officers. Both instances end in multiple officers dead on the ground. One character is shot through the head in a scuffle. A man is propelled through the air by a grenade launcher explosion.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Cam accidentally shoots Will. Will intentionally shoots Danny.

Crude or Profane Language

Profanities fly out of peoples’ lips like they are going out of style. More than 90 f-words are heard (six of which are preceded by “mother”), and we hear more than 55 uses of the s-word. We hear one use of the n-word. “A–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—” are also frequently used. “P-ss” is used twice, and “d–k” is heard once. God’s name is misused at least 14 times, and five of those are followed by “d–n.” Jesus’ name is inappropriately used eight times. We hear multiple crude references to the male anatomy.

Drug & Alcohol Content

An EMT asks Cam if she is drinking a beer at lunch while they’re on duty (She tells him it’s non-alcoholic). A smoker smokes a cigar on two occasions. Agent Clark references rosé wine. We see Amy’s prescription medication. Cam mentions that she used to be addicted to speed and got kicked out of med school for it.

Other Noteworthy Elements

An EMT says he’s going to vomit. Will repeatedly lies to his wife about where he is and who he’s with. Jokes are made about a police captain’s dog—specifically the canine’s noxious gas.

Basing a movie around a car chase in Los Angeles makes me think that the traffic in La La Land must not be quite as bad as I imagined. Either that, or Will Sharp is a really good driver, and I can’t help but wonder why the unemployed man desperate for money didn’t drive for Uber.

Michael Bay’s Ambulance takes us on a two-hour car chase with an added twist: What if the criminals’ getaway vehicle was an ambulance, and they had the added problem of needing to keep a dying man alive in the back?

Bay also asks another question: What if they spent half of the budget on fake blood and the other half on exploding cars? That’s not exactly a new question by Bay’s standards, but it’s one he loves asking, and it’s no different in this film.

Danny and Will are two brothers who are just trying to rob a meager $32 million in a one-off bank heist (though Danny’s actually robbed 37 banks before this one, so “38-off” would be more accurate for him). Will needs the money to pay for his wife’s expensive experimental surgery, and Danny needs the money because he’s a bad guy who likes money, and that’s all you’re going to get for an explanation. Obviously, Will comes across as the more sympathetic of the two.

And as they subsequently hijack an ambulance and take us through the uncrowded streets of Los Angeles, they’ll show us just what kind of bad guy Danny actually is. We’ll see police officers get shot and blown up. We watch Danny shoot at pursuers directly after telling Will to not shoot any police officers. There’s tons of car crashes and explosions, and we watch enough blood drip from dead and dying bodies to cover the Santa Monica State Beach. Though the ambulance runs on gasoline, the characters in the film seem to run on swear words, spouting nearly two hundred vulgarities throughout the film—almost half of them the f-word.

By the end of the movie, as we sit there wondering what the point of all of it was, we can only come to the conclusion that someone just had $40 million to blow on car crashes and explosions.

Kennedy Unthank

Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”

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‘Ambulance’ Review: Michael Bay Is Our Emergency Movie Technician

The action auteur’s latest opus stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as bank robbers who commandeer an unlikely getaway vehicle.

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By A.O. Scott

I wish someone had come with me to the screening of “Ambulance,” so I could have leaned over at a key point early in the story and whispered, “That must be the ambulance.” It’s great when movies make you feel smart.

Not that anyone necessarily goes to Michael Bay movies for that reason. And “Ambulance,” which includes verbal shout-outs to “Bad Boys” and “The Rock,” is something of a return to form for this auteur of vehicular mayhem and muscular bombast. A relatively low-budget project, especially when compared with the “Transformers” franchise he started, it bundles explosive set pieces into a plot that would be preposterous if you stopped to think about it.

The whole idea is that you won’t. Bay’s virtuosic flouting of the laws of physics, probability and narrative coherence is meant to catapult you into a zone of sublimity where melodramatic emotion and adrenalized excitement fuse into a whole new kind of sensation. Big, operatic feelings — mostly having to do with loyalty, honor and professionalism — are both heightened and lightened by propulsive speed and overscaled action. You’re not required to believe any of it, but somehow the word that comes to mind when I reflect on the 136 minutes I spent pinned to my seat watching this thing is “persuasive.”

That’s partly because “Ambulance,” built on the chassis of a 2005 Danish movie of the same name, is advancing an argument, or maybe a meta-argument, about the current state and aesthetic raison d’être of cinema.

Some of the salient points are made through dialogue (the script is by Chris Fedak), in a series of offhand jokes about the current state of pop-cultural literacy. At one point the criminal mastermind (Jake Gyllenhaal) refers to one of his minions as “Mel Gibson,” insisting on a resemblance that isn’t really there and invoking “Braveheart.” He seems to think that movie won “a bunch of Grammys.”

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Here is a detailed explanation of the ending of Michael Bay's Ambulance . Ambulance is the latest action-thriller from Bay, who's best known for his work in the Transformers franchise, as well over-the-top explosive films like Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor . The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp, Eiza González as Cam Thompson, Garret Dillahunt as Captain Monroe, Jackson White as Officer Zach, A Martinez as Papi and Keir O'Donnell as FBI Agent Anson Clark. Taking place over the course of one day, Ambulance is a relentless, high-octane roller-coaster that quite literally never slows down but instead throws a number of wild plot, character and story devices at the audience in the midst of the chase.

Both Danny and Will are orphans, raised by a criminal, with Danny following the same path and Will attempting to escape it by joining the military. However, now out of the military, Will's wife is in need of an experimental surgery, which he can't afford, so he turns to Danny for help. Danny, however, lures Will into a bank robbery to solve his monetary dilemma, which sets them both on a path of destruction and redemption. As the bank robbery goes horribly wrong and both Danny and Will must make their escape, they find themselves taking an ambulance hostage, which has an injured cop (Officer Zach) and an EMT (Gonzalez's Cam) aboard. With the police and F.B.I. in hot pursuit, Danny calls up his gangster friend Papi, an associate of his deceased criminal father, and has him set up a diversion to aid in their escape, promising Papi half his score in return for the help, setting the chaotic events of Ambulance in motion.

Related: Every Movie Coming To Theaters In April 2022

It all comes to a head when the diversion leads Danny and Will back to Papi's hideout, where Danny attempts to hand over Papi's share and move on. However, Papi wants to kill both Cam and Officer Zach, as they are now liabilities that have seen his operation. This leads to a shoot out that has Will, Danny, Cam, and Officer Zach back in the ambulance, ending up at a hospital where the finale plays out with bloody consequences and emotional redemption. Here's the Ambulance ending explained and what it really means.

What Was Danny's Robbery Plan In Ambulance (And Why Did It Go Wrong?)

Danny Sharp with a machine gun in Ambulance

Jake Gyllenhaal's Danny had been robbing banks his whole adult life (38 in total, including the one in Ambulance ). Shouldered with a group of ex-military guys and slacker criminals, Danny had intel on a Federal Bank carrying $32 million in cash, which he and his crew are preparing to take down. Will, in need of monetary assistance from his brother, is reluctantly pulled into the heist, even though he has had absolutely no briefing on their plan or agenda. From the get go Danny is obviously not confident in his crew, who are all a bit wired and odd, lacking any real cohesion or trust. Their initial insertion into the bank and taking it over goes over without a hitch, but Officer Zach throws it all in disarray when he maneuvers his way into the bank with the intent of asking out a teller, having no idea that the place is actively being robbed.

The bigger problem is that the LAPD's SIS (Special Investigation Section) is already on to Danny's crew and are waiting outside of the bank to catch them in the act. This aspect upsets Danny's plans before he even knew it, making his Ambulance heist doomed from the start. However, Officer Zach's involvement is what kicks off the gunfire, as his partner, Officer Mark, sees him being taken hostage from the bank windows, prompting him to take action. Danny's getaway driver sees that they are made and attempts to run over Officer Mark, but ultimately ends up crashing, thereby destroying Danny's chances of a clean getaway and forcing him to go on the run. In their haste to escape, Officer Zach is shot by Will and later picked up in the same ambulance that they commandeer, making it a perfect storm of chaos as Danny's ill-planned and ill-fated robbery goes completely wrong.

Will And Danny: How They Are Related And How They Are Different

Ambulance Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gylenhaal

Danny and Will were adoptive brothers raised by their criminal adoptive father LT, who had ties to local gangs and brought both Will and Danny up in that lifestyle, shaping them to follow in his footsteps. LT is recently deceased at the start of Michael Bay's Ambulance , but neither Danny or Will seem particularly hurt over it. Instead, Danny appears to be in control of what is left of his criminal empire. Will ended up joining the Marine's in order to escape the criminal life, while Danny pursued it, supposedly studying law enforcement as a means to learning how to combat them. The film shows the two as kids via flashback, although never with any dialogue. They appear to be close, but their personalities couldn't be more different. Danny is erratic, hyper and ill-tempered, whereas Will is more calm, collected, and focused, making their dynamic together like two opposing forces. While both were raised to be criminals, only Danny has embraced it fully, while Will actively fought to get away from it. However, even as Will attempted to escape the life, the very plot of Ambulance shows that he's someone that would choose crime as a means to an end, making him more similar to Danny than he would like to admit.

Related: Why Reviews For Michael Bay's Ambulance Are So Divided

What Happened To Cam That Led To Her Being an E.M.T.

Eiza Gonzalez in the back of an ambulance in Ambulance

Gonzalez's Cam was a medical student that got addicted to speed and screwed up her chances at medical school as a result, forcing her to drop out and eventually become an EMT. She punishes herself by focusing on just doing the job at hand and relinquishing all distractions, such as getting emotionally involved with anyone — be it friends, lovers, or people she's treated. At the beginning of the film she's seen rescuing a little girl from a car crash, saving her life in the process. However, while having lunch with her new partner, it's revealed that she has closed off all emotion to the job, both in personal and professional means, even telling her new partner that she doesn't care to know him or share anything about herself, let alone hear anything about the patients she's treated. This plays into Ambulance when she's taken hostage and makes the choice not only to stay when she could've escaped but also to do everything in her power to help save Officer Zach (and Will later in the film).

Why Will And Danny Stay In The Ambulance (And Why The Police Don't Stop Them)

One of the biggest questions about the plot of Michael Bay 's Ambulance is why Danny and Will would stay in the ambulance and why the police wouldn't just shoot out the tires or ram the vehicle off the road. Ambulance flimsily makes the main reason for this revolve around Officer Zach, who is aboard the ambulance and in need of serious medical treatment. Danny knows that having the cop in the ambulance is the only thing that would keep them alive long enough for him to come up with a plan to escape. Danny simply didn't have any kind of a back-up plan for the robbery to go wrong, leaving him to make decisions on the move. The police and the F.B.I. simply want to protect the life of Officer Zach, who they know is in critical condition, so shooting out the tires or ramming the vehicle off the road would seemingly put his life at further risk. Their fall back is to have a hostage negotiator attempt to get them to stop, while maintaining close pursuit.

What Was Danny and Papi's Plan To Trick The Police (And Why It Didn't Work)

Danny called Papi, a gang leader with affiliations to his father, in order to get him to stage a diversion by stealing a bunch of empty ambulances and park them under a bridge, which would confuse the police once Danny's ambulance made it there and they all went off in different directions. However, Papi also set up an ambulance full of explosives, as well as a car rigged with a mini-gun that was remote controlled and went after the police. The goal was to thwart, confuse and stall the police in order for Danny to make it back to Papi's hideout for the money exchange. That part of the plan seemed to work, if only temporarily, as it got Danny and Will to Papi's headquarters without incident. However, police were circling the area, looking for any signs of them, which meant that they would be locked down there for a while. However, once Papi said that he would have to "take care" of both Cam and Officer Zach, Will and Danny took action, killing Papi and engaging with his crew as they made their escape yet again in the ambulance, causing an explosive scene that alerted the cops and put them back on their trail. Resultantly, the whole plan failed.

Why Will Shot Danny And Why Cam Saved Will Afterward

yahya abdul-mateen II and Jake Gylenhaal in Ambulance

After being accidentally shot by Cam, Abdul-Mateen II's Will is in dire shape and needs serious medical assistance. However, Cam stabilizes him, just before Danny pulls into a hospital where he intends to get his brother help. When it appears that he may not make it, Danny blames Cam and decides to take her outside the ambulance, which is surrounded by cops, to kill her and then be killed himself. However, just as he opens the doors Will shoots Danny in the back, saving Cam's life, whom he had sworn to protect, and ended Danny's reign of terror. Both men are pulled from the ambulance and laid on the ground where Danny apologizes to Will before dying. Cam is pulled away and told to leave them be, but the journey has reopened her emotional side and she cares for Will, having seen him help save Officer Zach, as well as save her own life. Cam defies the police and forces them to help Will, as it appeared they were going to let him just bleed out and die.

Related: Spielberg Was Right: Michael Bay Should've Stopped After Transformers 3

The Real Meaning Of Ambulance

Cam looking to the distance in Ambulance.

Ultimately, Michael Bay's Ambulance ending is about redemption. Danny appears to be irredeemable, even if charming, as he's a full-blown sociopath criminal. Will, on the other hand, is a reluctant criminal, operating under the guise of helping his family, even though that ends up costing lives and infinite destruction around L.A. For Cam, redemption comes in the form of being put through intense pressure, testing her limits in saving lives and showing that she has the capacity to do so. Not only did she save Officer Zach in a harrowing zoom-call surgery aboard the ambulance, but she also saved Will from bleeding out in the end. This allows Cam to see her self worth, which sees her visiting the little girl she saved earlier, showing that she once again cares about the effect she has, which she's proven can be truly life saving. For Will, redemption comes in the form of choosing to protect people even in the face of making a bad choice, which ultimately gets him the money he needs (as Cam sneaks it to his wife) and likely a lighter sentence later on, as Officer Zach says that Will saved his life, rather than admitting that it was Will who actually shot him in the first place.

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Ambulance review: a maximalist’s thrilling take on a close-quarters predicament.

Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.

We don’t stop!” screams career criminal Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal) to the LAPD officer, Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), who’s been pursuing him since a bank robbery went all sorts of wrong earlier that afternoon. While Danny is talking about the titular vehicle that he and his adopted brother, Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), hijacked in order to use as a makeshift getaway, his declaration could just as easily double as Ambulance ’s mission statement from director Michael Bay.

Bay’s filmmaking has always been defined by its stylistic excess, from rapid-fire editing to swish pans to highly saturated colors. Ambulance certainly offers more of the same in that department, as we get swirling drone shots that dive down the edge of skyscrapers for no other reason than it looks cool, and pointless money shots of American flags at magic hour.

But for all its frenetic and overindulgent flourishes, the film’s stripped-down narrative allows for an emotional intimacy and vulnerability between characters that Bay typically eschews, mocks, or merely aestheticizes. Indeed, Ambulance builds tension and pathos not only through its central, seemingly endless, car chase, but through the ever-shifting dynamic that develops between Danny, Will, and Cam (Eiza González), the paramedic who they’ve taken hostage. Within the ambulance’s tight quarters, Danny’s unusual blend of ruthlessness and empathy bounces off of Will’s unbending pragmatism and Cam’s steely resolve in the face of danger in surprising ways, especially as they figure out what to do with the second hostage, Officer Parker (Jackson White), who’s bleeding out in the back of the vehicle.

It’s probably giving Bay too much credit to suggest that he’s grappling with the fascist tendencies of his earlier work, especially since Ambulance ’s gleeful flashes of self-awareness are mostly just ego-flattering references to his past work and acknowledgements of his need for speed. (“It’s a very expensive car chase right now,” says a police officer played by Olivia Stambouliah after several police cars have been smashed to bits.) But Will’s wrestling with the costs of his actions still feels like a step forward for the filmmaker, whose chase scenes in Bad Boys II show a casual indifference to human life that remains shocking to this day.

Taking its lead from literal “non-stop” action films like Speed and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three , Ambulance is ultimately too breakneck in its pacing to contemplate much at all. And while Bay’s work has rarely left much room for thought, that becomes something of a strength here, as the film’s jumpy, jagged editing and jolting camera moves perfectly encapsulate Danny, Will, and Monroe’s anxiety over being forced to constantly make split-second, life-or-death decisions as the ambulance speeds its way through Los Angeles.

As the film moves rhythmically between exterior and interior spaces, it allows for a compelling interplay between the big, chaotic action set pieces we’ve come to expect from Bay and the drama playing out inside the ambulance. For Will and Danny, keeping Parker alive means that they get to have a bargaining chip, which helps raise the stakes in a particularly gruesome scene where the underqualified Cam must slice open Parker’s stomach to remove a bullet. It’s one of the most gripping and nerve-wracking scenes of Bay’s career, especially because there’s a weight to the depiction of these lives on the brink of the void, and to Danny’s sense of self-preservation clashing with Will’s desire to minimize the carnage of their escapades.

Ambulance touches a number of themes, from the healthcare system and veteran care to fraternal loyalty and honor among thieves. But at its essence, it’s primarily about motion and inertia, both in the mostly unbroken movement of its characters through the city and in the manner in which Will’s initially minor step back into the world of crime, after decades away, becomes an irrevocable decision that sends him on a downward spiral.

The disorienting speed with which one bad decision can snowball out of control becomes the film’s ultimate raison d’etre. Answering Danny’s question about why he left home to join the Army, Will tells him, “It gave me purpose.” The same could be said of Bay and Chris Fedak’s screenplay for Ambulance , as the former’s frenzied stylistic tics have rarely been so well-suited and effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.

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Official Discussion - Ambulance [SPOILERS]

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Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry.

Michael Bay

Chris Fedak

Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp

Eiza González as Cam Thompson

Garret Dillahunt as Captain Monroe

Keir O'Donnell as FBI Agent Anson Clark

Jackson White as Officer Zach

Olivia Stambouliah as Lieutenant Dzaghig

-- Rotten Tomatoes: 67%

Metacritic: 56

VOD: Theaters

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BANKING PARTNER

Real estate partner, malaika arora's father anil mehta dies by suicide; mumbai police confirm he jumped off balcony.

Curated By : Shreyanka Mazumdar

Last Updated: September 12, 2024, 10:29 IST

Mumbai, India

Malaika Arora and Amrita Arora with their father Anil Mehta and mother Joyce Polycarp.

Actress Malaika Arora's father Anil Mehta reportedly jumped from the balcony of his home. Mumbai police are probing the incident and the family is yet to release a statement.

Actresses Malaika Arora and Amrita Arora’s father, Anil Mehta, died by suicide on Wednesday afternoon. According to Mumbai Police, he jumped from the balcony of his home in Mumbai’s Bandra. The family, however, has yet to release a statement on the tragic incident. Malaika’s ex-husband Arbaaz Khan rushed to Malaika’s parents’ home to be by her and her family’s side.

Read here: Malaika Arora visited parents’ home a day before the tragedy

Malaika Arora’s Mother’s Statement To Police: Sources claimed Malaika’s mother, Joyce, in her statement to the police, said that Anil Mehta would routinely sit on the balcony and read the newspapers every morning. She told the police that they were divorced, but had started living together again for the past few years. She told the police that on Wednesday morning, when she saw her ex-husband’s slippers in the living room, she went to look for him on the balcony.

When she could not find him there, she leaned over and saw below. The building watchman was shouting for help. Joyce also told the police that Anil Mehta was not suffering from any illness. He only had some knee pain.

Police’s Statement To The Press: Speaking with the media gathered outside Malaika’s parents’ home, the police said, “Anil used to live on the sixth floor. We are carrying out a detailed investigation from all angles… our forensic teams are here for investigation. His body is being sent for postmortem. We are investigating everything… prima facie it looks like suicide, we are conducting further investigation.”

How Did Malaika Arora React?

In a video gone viral, an inconsolable Malaika is seen rushing into the building. She reportedly rushed back to Mumbai from Pune after hearing the tragic news. Malaika’s ex-husband, actor-producer Arbaaz Khan, was also seen outside Anil Mehta’s residence on Wednesday , talking to the police officials and taking stock of the situation. The area around the house has been cordoned off with heavy police deployment, ensuring privacy and order during this sensitive time. An ambulance was also stationed outside the building.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Henil Gala (@henilgala_97)

Maharashtra | Father of actress-model Malaika Arora died by suicide by jumping off a terrace. Police team is present at the spot: Mumbai Police— ANI (@ANI) September 11, 2024

Malaika’s celebrity friends were seen visiting the family after the news broke, with videos of her former partner Arjun Kapoor, and others doing the rounds on social media. Her ex-husband’s family, too, rushed to be by her side. Her former in-laws Salim Khan and Salma Khan along with son Sohail Khan and daughter Alvira Agnihotri were present at Malaika’s parents’ home.

Several other Bollywood stars such as Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, Ananya Panday, Kajol, Chunky Panday and Neha Dhupia visited the family.

DISCLAIMER: This news piece may be triggering. If you or someone you know needs help, call any of these helplines: Aasra (Mumbai) 022-27546669, Sneha (Chennai) 044-24640050, Sumaitri (Delhi) 011-23389090, Cooj (Goa) 0832- 2252525, Jeevan (Jamshedpur) 065-76453841, Pratheeksha (Kochi) 048-42448830, Maithri (Kochi) 0484-2540530, Roshni (Hyderabad) 040-66202000, Lifeline 033-64643267 (Kolkata).

(Editor’s Note: In an earlier version of this story, we inadvertently referred to the late Anil Mehta as Anil Arora. We regret the error.)

Amrita Arora
Malaika Arora

IMAGES

THE AMBULANCE OF DEATH/FULL MOVIE/horror movie
‘Ambulance’ movie review: Michael Bay dials it up to 911 in nonstop
Ambulance Girl (2005)
Ambulance (2016)
Olivia Stambouliah
Ambulance Girl

VIDEO

Cops Delay Ambulance 💀| In-Custody Death, 07/2023 Rockford, Illinois
The “Ambulance of death” from 📍Nova. Although people sheltered in it, the Hamas burnt it completly
Old woman's death blamed on rejected ambulance request
Family's horror over mum's ambulance death has Ally in tears
They've got stuck in the ambulance😰#series #movie #greysanatomy #shorts
Ambulance Intense Final Scene

COMMENTS

Ambulance movie review & film summary (2022)
And Bay's latest, "Ambulance," is a thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast. "Ambulance" is a remake of the 2005 Danish film "Ambulancen," with a few key differences. Both are about brothers who turn to bank robbery to pay for a relative's medical bills.
Ambulance
A charismatic career criminal, Danny instead offers him a score: the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million. With his wife's survival on the line, Will can't say no. But when their ...
'Ambulance' Review: Michael Bay's 'Die Hard' on an EMS Van
'Ambulance' Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in Michael Bay's Retro Excessive 'Die Hard' on an EMS Van Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, March 23, 2022. MPAA rating: R. Running time: 136 MIN.
Ambulance (2022)
Ambulance: Directed by Michael Bay. With Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Garret Dillahunt. Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry.
Ambulance Review: Michael Bay's Best Film in Decades
By cutting back and simply sticking to the thrills and the madness of this situation and little else, Bay has made one of his best films in decades. Rating: B. Ambulance comes to theaters on April ...
'Ambulance' Movie Review: Michael Bay's Thrill Ride
Photo: Andrew Cooper/Universal Studios. Ambulance, the latest from director Michael Bay, is a film powered by the jittery force of will and blissful confidence that comes with doing cocaine. Lots ...
Ambulance review: Jake Gyllenhaal shines in action thriller
The biggest issue with Ambulance is sometimes the frantic camera movements can make it easy to lose track of the action during particularly harrowing scenes in the cramped confines of the emergency vehicle, but it still works as an aesthetic choice while the film continues to climb in intensity throughout. At the end of the day, Ambulance 's ...
Ambulance Review
Ambulance is a big, loud action flick that stomps its way through downtown Los Angeles and leaves you wondering what the hell you just witnessed. It's Dog Day Afternoon meets Speed with all the ...
'Ambulance' review: Michael Bay firing on all brain-numbing cylinders
Rated: R, for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout. Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes. Playing: In general release. Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to ...
Ambulance review: Michael Bay and Jake Gyllenhaal's movie mayhem
Noble but hard-up ex-marine Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) agrees to help his hot-headed, Mexican-mafia-connected adopted brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) with a heist that - d'urh! - goes wrong.
'Ambulance' Review: A Mind-Numbing, Explosion-Laden ...
March 24, 2022 12:00 pm. "Ambulance". Universal. Loud macho bravado oozes from each explosion-laden, mind-numbing, testosterone-overdosing shot in the grossly expensive — and often quite ...
Ambulance Is One of Michael Bay's Best and Most Human Movies
The movie is also almost entirely free of Bay's tendencies towards toxicity: blessedly bereft of cringe-inducing racist jokes and the director's leering gaze, Ambulance emerges as, without ...
Ambulance Ending Explained: No Heroes, No Villains
Following a long and harrowing chase around LA, the ambulance finally finds itself driven right up to the emergency room entrance of a hospital by Danny in a frantic attempt to save Will's life ...
'Ambulance' Review: Unhinged at Any Speed
Finally the film, which was freely adapted from a Danish feature of the same name (with a running time of 80 minutes), pulls together its various strands—cop shot, ambulance arrives, ambulance ...
Ambulance Review
Ambulance, the action specialist's 15th feature film, was trumpeted as a return to the director's roots, shot rapidly in the summer of 2020 on a fraction of the budget he usually plays with ...
Ambulance
Violent Content. Michael Bay has a multidecade reputation for directing and producing movies filled with explosions and violence, including Transformers, The Purge and Armageddon.Ambulance continues that craft with ample blood, gore and fiery explosions.In general, many cars crash, myriads of bullets are fired, pints of blood paint Los Angeles red, and people die.
Ambulance (2022 film)
Ambulance is a 2022 American action heist film co-produced and directed by Michael Bay and written by Chris Fedak. A co-production between New Republic Pictures, Project X Entertainment, and Bay Films, it is a remake of the 2005 Danish film of the same name.It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as adoptive brothers who hijack an ambulance after robbing a bank and take a paramedic ...
Ambulance
Decorated veteran Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), desperate for money to cover his wife's medical bills, asks for help from the one person he knows he shouldn't—his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). A charismatic career criminal, Danny instead offers him a score: the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million. With his wife's survival on the line, Will can't ...
'Ambulance' Review: Michael Bay Is Our Emergency Movie Technician
Ambulance - Official Trailer [HD] Watch on. That's partly because "Ambulance," built on the chassis of a 2005 Danish movie of the same name, is advancing an argument, or maybe a meta ...
Ambulance Ending Explained (In Detail)
Here is a detailed explanation of the ending of Michael Bay's Ambulance. Ambulance is the latest action-thriller from Bay, who's best known for his work in the Transformers franchise, as well over-the-top explosive films like Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp, Eiza González as Cam Thompson, Garret ...
Ambulance, review: Michael Bay, master of action and crass chauvinism
Ambulance - Official Trailer [HD] For a certain type of critic and cinephile, Bay has long been held up as the grand vizier of all crassness and chauvinism in modern-day Hollywood, and Ambulance ...
'Ambulance' Review: A Maximalist Look at a Close-Quarters Predicament
And while Bay's work has rarely left much room for thought, that becomes something of a strength here, as the film's jumpy, jagged editing and jolting camera moves perfectly encapsulate Danny, Will, and Monroe's anxiety over being forced to constantly make split-second, life-or-death decisions as the ambulance speeds its way through Los ...
Official Discussion
Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry. Director: Michael Bay. Writers: Chris Fedak. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny Sharp. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp. Eiza González as Cam Thompson.
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The film was released theatrically on 16 February 2024, where it received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics. ... an ex-ambulance driver turned prisoner, gets a parole after 14 years to visit his dying father and daughter Malar in Kanchipuram. Malar gets upset with Thilagan as he is a convict and also blamed for her mother Jennifer's death ...
Malaika Arora's Father Anil Arora Dies By Suicide; Mumbai ...
News » movies » Malaika Arora's Father Anil Arora Dies By Suicide ... ensuring privacy and order during this sensitive time. An ambulance was also stationed outside the building. ... 2024): Arbaaz Khan's Family, Led By Salim Khan, Salma Khan, Helen Rush To Console Malaika After Dad's Death. Bike-Borne Gunmen Swoop In On Polio Workers In ...
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Francis claimed he must give authorization for any recreation of Cushing's image following an agreement made between him and the actor in 1993, one year before his death at age 81.

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