Review: Can Michael Bay save the blockbuster? Nutso ‘Ambulance’ is his best in decades

Is Michael Bay feeling OK? Has anybody checked his blood strain just lately? Provided the person a pleasant cup of camomile and verbena? These are official inquiries to ask, as one emerges punch-drunk, blinded by lens flare and dripping with second-hand testosterone switch, from “Ambulance,” his newest — and by the requirements of his 2000s output, finest — assault on the occipital lobe.

Simply to observe this deliriously dumb actioner is an amber-threat-level occasion finest averted by these with pacemakers or PhDs; think about truly making it. Most likely sensible that it’s set within the titular emergency response automobile, guaranteeing easy accessibility throughout capturing to defibrilllators and tongue depressors. As a result of the difficulty of Bay persevering with within the rudest of well being will not be merely idle chit-chat. With this noisy, nonsensical, nutso film careening, crazy-eyed onto a cinematic freeway in any other case choked with interchangeably airless superhero properties, this most inessential of blockbuster filmmakers has all of a sudden proved himself weirdly priceless. Mr. Bay, please get your thyroid checked out, as a result of apparently, we’d like you.

“Ambulance” is predicated on a Danish thriller, within the sense that Bay has taken that movie’s lean little premise — about bank-robbing brothers commandeering an ambulance that additionally comprises an EMT and her dying affected person — put it on a protein-and-steroid eating regimen and despatched it to the fitness center to bulk up until its veins pop.

Much less care was taken beefing up the screenplay (tailored by Chris Fedak), however one hardly involves a Michael Bay film for the Wildean wordplay. To provide you some thought, the wittiest change (other than a genuinely pleasant interlude scored to Christopher Cross’ “Crusing) is a labored bit about one of many heist crew (Devan Chandler Lengthy) trying so like “Braveheart”-era Mel Gibson that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Danny insists on calling him “Mel Gibson.” It’s significantly baffling given Lengthy seems to be nothing like Gibson, and is definitely a ringer for MMA fighter Conor McGregor, however that will be a reference too up-to-date for “Ambulance,” which, even when it refers immodestly to Bay’s personal again catalogue, identify checks “The Rock” and “Dangerous Boys” slightly than something from this millennium.

Danny is the wildcard adoptive brother of straight-edged Military vet Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, making gentle work of a slightly 2D good-guy function), whose spouse is in dire want of a life-saving therapy, which their medical insurance won’t cowl.

Thus Will turns to Danny on the very day — wouldn’t you understand it — that Danny is planning to rob an area financial institution and is one man quick for the job. By interesting to their shared previous (the Will-Danny relationship is steeped in brotherly Baythos, and damned if it doesn’t form of work) Will will get talked into it, however the heist goes awry early when lovelorn Officer Zach (Jackson White) pushes his means into the financial institution at precisely the unsuitable second and will get shot for his hassle. Fortunately for him, unfeasibly engaging EMT Cam (Eiza Gonzalez), a.okay.a. the “finest paramedic on the town” — and positively the one with essentially the most unsmudgeably luscious lipgloss — is close by, however when Danny and Will want a getaway automobile for themselves and all their stolen cash, they commandeer her ambulance with Cam and a dying Zach nonetheless in it.

Cam — gratifyingly, by a long way the least ogled of Bay’s feminine leads — valiantly tries to maintain Zach alive, which Danny and Will quickly notice is of their finest pursuits too: The pursing police, led by Garret Dillahunt’s Capt. Monroe and Keir O’Donnell’s FBI Agent Clark, are a lot much less prone to merely blow the automobile up in the event that they know that “one in all their very own” is alive inside it.

Don’t fear if this makes “Ambulance” sound a bit copagandist — you’d be laborious pushed to discover a coherent political agenda in a film this anarchically devoted to making sure nobody scene has any bearing on the one which got here earlier than. It’s bizarre {that a} movie so thuddingly simplistic in its two-hour-plus arc must be so totally mystifying on a moment-to-moment foundation, however that’s “Bayhem” for ya.

There’s a number of zooming about (it’s by no means precisely clear the place to) as medical problems guarantee Cam has to improvise a grisly surgical procedure on the go, Will has to provide blood whereas driving and Danny has to shout and bug his eyes so much (which Gyllenhaal is nice at, like a really good-looking Offended Hen). A complete lot extra characters are briefly launched, given one defining attribute, like “wears Birkenstocks,” “is homosexual,” “has a canine” or “always bitches about his spouse” after which simply as rapidly disbursed with. However then, principally the actors appear employed much less for his or her roles than for his or her agility in stepping nimbly away when one in all Bay and director of pictures Roberto De Angelis’ drone-mounted cameras comes barreling at them with the unstoppable drive of a surface-to-air missile.

However as lunatic because the filmmaking is, and as a lot as Bay’s type tries to divorce it from precise physics totally, it’s additionally reassuringly actual: There’s one thing nearly quaint about realizing that when the battered van is rushing down the concrete channels of the L.A. River, being pursued by two police choppers and a kamikaze squadron of police vehicles, they’re precise autos, going truly quick in an precise place. It’s so good to see cash inexcusably wasted this manner, slightly than on the inflated salaries of film stars midway by way of their nine-picture contracts, waving their arms round in entrance of a inexperienced display. The CGI right here is minimal, and Bay just lately clarified feedback he made about its high quality, saying there are, in actual fact, solely two pictures he doesn’t like in the entire film. Two! Contemplating it comprises roughly 12 billion pictures, that’s a fairly good common.

So “Ambulance” will not be good, precisely. Nonetheless it’s an satisfying, oddly inspiring reminder of what number of extra flavors not-good used to come back in, within the olden days, again after we had the luxurious of concerning Michael Bay’s model of adrenalized, lobotomized moviemaking as a menace to blockbuster cinema, slightly than — gulp — one in all its potential saviors.