If you weren't aware, L.A. actually does have a downtown, so to speak, with high-rises and many of the big-city trappings that other towering metropolises do (though few people actually live there). Michael Bay lovingly tries to set most of his newest hyperventilating bank robbery caper "Ambulance" in the downtown area to give the movie a sense of place, but, in truth, we never really leave Bayland, a world in which cameras swoop drunkenly, dialogue is minimal and brainless, emotional arcs are one-note at best, and every knock against a vehicle leaves it exploding in a massive fireball.
Of course, there is an audience for such hyperventilating spectacle -- at the public advance screening I attended, there were actually scatterings of applause at the end -- but before you plunk over your hard-earned ducats for tickets, you should at least know what you're getting yourself into. It's like an ode to L.A., in bullets, bombs, and idiotic bang bang, written in nacho cheese and Pop Rocks.
You might have some fun if you're into that sort of thing, but it sure won't be from the sophistication of the plot. We meet former Marine Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) as he's pleading his case to a health insurance agent to get approval for his wife to receive an experimental medical procedure (for a condition never specified, a hallmark of this woebegotten screenplay, which never specifies anything if it can just gloss over such detail). After getting rejected, and with nowhere else to turn, he calls on his wayward brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who, like Will, was adopted for some reason by a notorious criminal back in the day, and grew up in the family business of bank robbery.
Will's intention is to get a loan from the wild-eyed Danny, but instead, he happens to visit just as Danny is heading out with a misbegotten crew to hit up a downtown bank reportedly holding $32 million in cold currency. No sooner has Will sipped his Keurig, than he is whipped away with the rest of the gang to pull an ill-conceived heist that plays out as if it were planned by a particularly enterprising group of first-graders.
That's not even hyperbole. The plan involves charging into said bank, with Danny dressed in casual villainware (black turtleneck and gray sportcoat), the rest of his motley bunch with high-powered military weapons, in tow, and with a getaway delivery van that couldn't be more conspicuous if it had a gun turret sticking out of the roof.
Naturally, everything goes immediately to hell, and in the chaos and confusion, Danny and Will find themselves separated from the others, holding a couple of huge duffel bags full of bills, and having to take a cop, Officer Zach (Jackson White), whom they've just wounded, as a hostage, along with a beautiful but aloof EMT, Cam (Eiza Gonzalez), utilizing her ambulance as their make-do getaway car.
They don't get more than a couple of blocks away before the LAPD, led by a man named Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), gets a solid bead on them (they are, after all, in a freaking ambulance!). Swarmed by squad cars and helicopters from every angle, Will and Danny try to keep ahead of the law, as Cam fights for Zach's life getting tossed around in the back.
The film is based (pretty loosely) on a 2005 Danish film, "Ambulancen," which I haven't actually seen, but will assume is vastly superior, if for no other reason than it tells its taut story in 80 minutes. Not that Bay's film, from a screenplay "credited" to Chris Fedak, uses its additional 56 minutes of runtime to insert further plot twists or anything, it's really just so Bay has enough time for his characters to streak down clogged freeways, and dozens more cars to get blown to bits under a hail of high-powered ammo.
His films have become synonymous with this sort of mindless, fast-paced spectacle, and the director fully leans into the nonsensical nature of his craft: His cameras, mounted on drones, cars, or nothing at all, shaking with excitement, swoop, spin, and practically do loop-de-loops (more than once, the camera shoots up the front of a building, only to plunge back down again, like a ride on Kingda Ka); his edit points are fast, often blurry, and from so many angles at once your brain can't even track the through lines. All of this is designed to flood your senses enough that you don't notice how little there is of even the barest grains of substance to support any of the visual pyrotechnics continually erupting off the screen.
It's a little kid's conception of coherency -- something I might have pulled together while playing with my G.I. Joes when I was 6 -- that whooshes past as if you were standing between lanes on a rush-hour freeway. For brief moments, a particularly audacious sweep, zoom, or tracking shot might be arresting, but as a 136-minute mega opus, it quickly becomes punishing, beating you into submission with its unduly frantic pacing. That Bay attempts emotional arc closures by the end -- the brothers reconcile their differences, one way or the other; Cam learns to care about her patients -- is the final insult. It's like getting a stock greeting card from a friend who doesn't even bother to sign it.
It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with spectacle -- that has been cinema's calling card since its inception -- but Bay's sugar-addled, overwrought version of it is bunk. A bamboozlement attempting to deceive you from noticing that there's only the laziest of frameworks beneath it, a kid too lazy to do his homework, so he crumples a bunch of papers together and crams them into a really sweet looking pocket folder. He's hoping you won't notice the pages themselves are completely blank.
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None‘Ambulance’
75 Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza Gonzalez, Moses Ingram, Jackson White, Cedric Sanders, Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, A Martinez
Director: Michael Bay
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes
Playing theatrically