No one should feel sorry for Michael Bay. Let’s get that straight from the off. His sledgehammer blockbusters have grossed close to 8 billion dollars so he should be set for a rainy day. His five Transformer movies (you read that correctly – five) ran parallel with the growing success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but even the unstoppable force of his Bayhem directing style (blow everything up, jump cut the shit out of it, have irreverent characters make dumb jokes) has hit the immovable object of the Disney behemoth and been found wanting.
His latest movie, Ambulance has just about broken even on its forty-million-dollar budget and has been released on VOD about a month after its cinematic release. Bay is worth about half a billion dollars so casting him as the underdog is bound to stick in the craw for most. But letting a movie like Ambulance flatline at the cinema could be terminal for this kind of muscular action movie, one that doesn’t require you to watch an ever-expanding narrative big bang across multiple film and television shows. Yes, Ambulance is overlong but at least it has an ending.
If you park your frontal lobe and engage the lizard part of your brain, then Ambulance is pure crack-fuelled emotionality of the highest purity. Bay bullies the screen with an all-out assault of Bayhem maximus, taking his pent-up frustration of being grounded by Covid for two years and turns it into blazing cinematic aggression with an arsenal of secret weapons – drone shots. Thousands of them.
Unleashed like flying demons escaping hell, Baymageddon is wrought upon Los Angeles. Drones skim the polished concrete floors, accelerate up and down the sides of buildings, weave in and out of pillars and scud under exploding cars as they barrel and twist to their destruction. This is akin to Prometheus stealing fire from the gods or Zeus being gifted his lightning bolt by the Cyclopes to defeat Cronos and the Titans. Bay is the cinematic Oppenheimer, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Such a destructive enterprise needs an equally unhinged performance and Jake Gyllenhaal is Bay’s main horseman of the apocalypse. He plays Danny Sharp, a career bank robber looking to steal a cool 32 million dollars in cold, hard cash (bank transfers and PayPal just don’t cut it cinematically). Resplendent in cashmere and automatic weapons Danny cons his adopted brother Will, a down-on-his-luck ex-serviceman, to join the heist and before you can summon the ghost of Heat everything goes south leaving the brothers in a stolen ambulance with a wounded cop and the best damn paramedic in the city, Cam Thompson.
If characterisation is lacking, then it is more than compensated for by raw adrenaline, jaw-clenching performances. Gyllenhaal is all bulging eyes and wired nerves, “We’re a locomotive – WE DON’T STOP!” He’s a fiend for action and endlessly watchable as he bounces inside the ambulance jacked on God only knows what. Yaha Abdul–Mateen is stoic as his brother, the tether that just about stops Gyllenhaal leaving the planet like the “Starman” in Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster. Eiza González keeps her track record intact for playing kiss-ass action characters in movies like Baby Driver and Hobbs & Shaw as the hard-as-nails paramedic Cam.
Bayhem redlines the action constantly, it’s draining and exhausting but exhilarates in a way that few action movies ever can. It may not be Mad Max: Fury Road but it roughs up Marvel with its gonzo stunts and bombastic camera moves. In fact, Ambulance throws the camera around with such wanton abandon that it traces its DNA back to the The Evil Dead movies. Perhaps Marvel may have the final laugh as the director of those films is about to enter the fray with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Maybe we should feel sorry for Michael Bay after all.