‘Ambulance’ Review: Michael Bay is Our Emergency Film Technician


Before the big chase and shooting begins, the titular vehicle and its hero EMT, Cam Thompson (Eiza González), join a young car accident victim scraped onto a wrought iron fence. This kind of mishap forms the basis of shows like this one. “Grey’s Anatomy” and “9-1-1” and “Ambulance” can be seen as a constant critique of television’s domesticated presentation of disaster. In the morning, Cam saves the boy and performs emergency abdominal surgery while he’s lurking around during rush hour, meeting trauma surgeons via video chat in the middle of a car chase. Exploding cars and an exploding spleen put together in the perfect counterpoint: here’s the cinema, guys.

So do wild vertical drone shots where the camera shoots into the sky before falling back to earth, a carnival-drive act Bay adds to his repertoire of pike, hop, and dizzying effects. And finally, the story is an old-fashioned drama where coincidences, collisions, and perfect plans go horribly wrong.

At the center is a daylight heist that stole $32 million from a bank—a modest payoff compared to the $100 million Sean Connery was chasing in 1996’s “The Rock,” especially when you adjust for inflation. The main robbers are Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who grew up as siblings and raised by a criminal father. Flashbacks show their childhood states in the game, but as adults they took different paths. Danny followed in my father’s footsteps, while Will joined the Marine Corps. Now married (to Musa Ingram) and with a baby son, he is desperate to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment. When he stops by Danny’s office to ask for a loan, he signs a deal with Danny’s team.

Eventually, two hostages join them: Cam and his partner Mark (Cedric Sanders), a rookie cop named Zach (Jackson White), who is part of an elaborate tour of Los Angeles’ highways and streets. people on both sides of the law. It all ends up pretty much where you would expect it, but the actors do a good job of bubbling and getting emotional under pressure, and Gyllenhaal makes a volatile, attractive sociopath thing that isn’t as annoying as it could be.

That’s why, after a long discussion, my critical decision about “Ambulance” is: It’s a movie!

Ambulance
Graded RF bombs, exploding cars, a ruptured spleen. Working time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In movie theaters.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *