Food scientists try to find the bliss point. It is the perfect combination of ingredients such as fat, salt, and sugar in food that optimize deliciousness. It is why ice cream is so moreish. You can’t stop with just one bowl, or maybe that is just me.
Movies have sweet spots too, the bliss point for action movies revolve around kinetic action, characters you care about, unique camera movement, and a consistent and coherent story. Michael Bay, the director of Ambulance has arguably made some films that hit that action film bliss point with Con Air, The Rock, Bad Boys, unfortunately, Ambulance didn’t improve upon Bay’s oeuvre.
Ambulance follows Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a retired vet who is having trouble paying for his family’s medical bills and reconnects with his brother Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal) to get a loan. However, Danny has other plans and asks Will to join him on a “highly orchestrated” bank heist with two minutes’ notice.
The film also revolves around EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González), hard-nosed, with no emotional connection to the injured or her fellow EMT driver.
No surprise, the bank robbery for Danny’s crew goes sideways and they have to shoot their way out. In the process, a cop is shot and Thompson’s ambulance attempts to get the cop to safety. Danny and WIll hijack the Ambulance with Thompson and the shot cop inside it. They now proceed to drive all around Los Angeles to get away from the police.
In the films mentioned above, the protagonist was compelling and we went on an emotional journey with them. In this film, WIll is meant to be the main character but is passive the whole movie and Gyllenhaal’s star power doesn’t help that Danny is more captivating on-screen.
Going into the film you know Michael Bay is going to Michael Bay the hell out of the film. He did not hold back with non-stop camera movement. It is like this man has never found a tripod he likes to keep the camera still. There were periods of dizzying camera work, and not in a good way. In a way that made me feel sick with Bay finding out about drones and having them swoop and drop around buildings and into the action.
The camera never settles so you never get oriented to where the action is happening and what is going on. It could all have been shot in one city block, you don’t know. The camera is a microcosm of the film, it never felt settled, or grounded. It seemed that they hoped the frantic camera and pace of the movie could make up for the lack of story and character.
Bay has made a name for himself by making amazing films but he has taken the wrong lesson from what made those films successful and used all the cliche that he is known for in a film that felt there is a lot of effort put in and not much reward for the audience. There was not much bliss for me with this one.
By Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe
10th April 2022