Bay Daze
Michael Bay strips down for a ‘low budget’ only moderately pyrotechnical thriller marrying ‘Speed’ and ‘9-1-1’ and flirts with besting himself.
Ambulance
Director: Michael Bay • Writer: Chris Fedak, based on the screenplay Ambulancen by Laurits Munch-Petersen
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Garret Dillahunt, Cedric Sanders, Keir O'Donnell, Jackson White, Olivia Stambouliah, A Martinez
USA • 2hrs 16mins
Opens Hong Kong May 12 • IIB
Grade: B
On many levels we all know Michael Bay is a crappy filmmaker. But specificity is needed here. Bay’s films are (mostly) dumpster fires when it comes to plot, character and theme. They are not, however, poorly made. If anything he is one of the finest directors working; a master of action pacing, spectacle and the explosionary arts on a massive scale. Talking about budgets and money is inelegant but it’s such a part of Bay’s filmmaking it’s hard to avoid. Though the Transformers series made a shit ton of cash on budgets averaging in the neighbourhood of US$200 million (roughly the GDP of Kiribati), it’s Bay’s more, erm, modest films that are his best: 1996’s US$75 million classic The Rock, Bay’s high-water mark, the 2013 action-comedy oddity Pain & Gain (US$22 million!), and now Ambulance, indie-priced for Bay at US$40 million.
Bay’s latest noisy, clanging, a-sploding lunatic actioner is based on the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen (this is star Jake Gyllenhaal’s second kick at the Danish thriller remake can after The Guilty last year), which was a low-key thriller about the tension between two brothers that bubbles to the surface after they rob a bank of DKK25,000 (about HK$28,000). Needless to say, Bay turns everything up to 11: Why settle for 25,000 when you can have the heist worth US$32 million? Why hide the ambulance of the title in a barn for 20 minutes when you can have it crash through half of Los Angeles? Why have the EMT hostage beg and plead for oxygen cans when you can have her perform surgery in a moving van? Why wrap it up in 76 minutes (!) when you can tease it out for 136?
They’re brothers so racism is over in Bay’s world
We can joke all we want but Bay has an action aesthetic that puts amateurs like Rawson Marshall Thurber (the gawdawful Red Notice) to shame and that endless action directors (Louis Leterrier, Neveldine & Taylor) have been trying to duplicate since Bad Boys in 1995. All the Bay hallmarks are present and accounted for: slo-mo hero walks, ludicrous plot turns (such as the aforementioned mobile surgery – by Zoom!), jokes about other Michael Bay movies, military porn, reverence for police and soldiers (Bay refuses to read rooms), complete disregard for spatial awareness, and sun-dappled American flags flapping the breeze (14 this time).
Ambulance takes as much from its source material as it does from Jan de Bont’s Speed. The story starts with Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Candyman) fretting over past-due bills and how to pay for his wife’s expensive cancer surgery. He’s a retired Marine, and nothing upsets Bay more than disrespect for former solders. He gets in touch with his (possibly) rich brother Danny (Gyllenhaal, so racism is obviously over), who’s planned a bank heist and needs a driver. Will is an excellent driver. Why he’s excellent is never addressed. Who cares? Anyway, the heist goes sideways, and Will and Danny wind up hijacking an ambulance – carrying a cop Will shot while fleeing the scene of the crime – and a very attitudinal paramedic, Cam Thompson (Eiza González, who never bares her abs ’coz Mikey’s mature now). Pursuing them are LAPD SWAT dude Monroe (the always awesome Garret Dillahunt), the cop’s partner Mark (Cedric Sanders) and Danny’s old FBI academy pal Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell). Things go badly.
We’re not sure why this dog had to be here
As much as Bay and writer Chris Fedak stick to many of the major beats from the original film – the ambulance does indeed hide in the urban LA version of a barn, complete with Latino gang, and the story ends with it rolling up to a hospital ER – there’s more cartoonish violence, more crashes and more inappropriately placed quips (sure a couple are pretty funny), though it’s hard to dispute how much fun Gyllenhaal is clearly having with his Crazy Bank Robber schtick – the intense kind Gyllenhaal would do. But the rest is pure Bayhem: the camera never stops moving unless it’s for a some slow motion gun violence agony, and is perpetually swooping from the top of LA’s most recognisable structures or gliding at high speed along its freeways (Bay’s a native Angeleno, so he knows how to exploit it visually), and the film’s two women are 1) a sick mother cradling an infant and 2) an embittered hard case who’s made a better woman by Will. Because girls. The first fiery explosion doesn’t happen for 100 minutes, making this positively restrained for Bay, bless his blustery little heart. Ambulance is great, big dumb entertainment that, had Bay followed the Danes’ lead and confined the action to lean 90 or 100 minutes, could have followed The Rock for Bay greatness. DEK