AMBULANCE

Fast and fun, Ambulance contains enough explosions to keep you rooted to your chair for the whole duration.

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By Rita Di Santo

This up-to-the-minute action movie delivers, in a carefree kind of way: it’s fast, fun, crude and adrenalin-pumping. And it has enough explosions to keep you rooted to your chair for the duration.

In urgent need of cash to pay for his wife’s surgery, Will (Yahya Abdul-Matten II), a decorated military veteran, appeals to his adoptive brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), but Danny is professional bank robber and convinces Will to join in his latest job. The heist goes wrong and the two find themselves on the run, hijacking an ambulance, complete with paramedic who trying to keep his patient—a cop! —alive. Cue a series of classic chasse scenes with seemingly all of Los Angeles’s police force and the FBI on their tail. Meanwhile, inside the ambulance, everything happens, including surgery.

Officially a remake of a 2005 independent Danish film, Bay claims he deliberately avoided watching that version in a bid to make Ambulance as distinctive as possible. He developed the project during the pandemic, aiming to make something to fight the boredom of being locked up at home. And indeed, he has delivered more than enough car crashes to make up for the entire period of the pandemic. The film also contains a satirical touch, where the line between the bad and the good guys, right and wrong, life and death, real and unreal, is wafer-thin. Politically correct up to the time, subtly antiracist, on occasion, it has the look of a cartoon-strip, with a black-and-white cop car spinning across the air, pumped up cops, bald with bushy beards and big guns yapping, a slick suited unfriendly FBI agent, a senior police officer with the classic mirror shades staring stony-jawed at the horizon – and a gorgeous big dog which one officer sentimentally takes to work with him in a tiny Fiat 500. But at its core are Abdul-Matten II and Gyllenhaal as a perfect sibling double act, their confident performances tapping into their distinct characters—even if the flashbacks succeed only in disrupting the flow.

With kinetic car chases and high-speed manoeuvres that will leave you gasping for breath, we can no longer say that nobody does action like James Cameron.