Call an ambulance!
AMBULANCE is Michael Bray’s latest blaze across the filament of his imagination, a far fetched stretcher of disbelief, the profligate bastard child from a celluloid union between Heat and Speed, failing to live up to its heralded hereditary.
Early on in AMBULANCE, there is reference to Bay’s 1996 film, The Rock, and though the riff it plays out as a zinger punchline, it also shows up the lack of Connery and Cage chemistry in the relationship of the two leads, Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, although Jake tries to make a fist of loopy Nick shenanigans.
With an overly souped up screenplay by Chris Fedak, AMBULANCE is based on the original story and screenplay for the 2005 Danish film Ambulancen by Laurits Munch-Petersen and Lars Andreas Pedersen and begins with decorated veteran Will Sharp desperate for money to cover his wife’s medical bills, asking for help from the one person he knows he shouldn’t, his adoptive brother Danny, a crazy, charismatic career criminal.
Danny isn’t into charity but he gives Will hope when he offers him the gig of wheel-man in a $32 million heist. In an act of faith and brotherly love, it’s an offer he can’t refuse.
The heist hits a hurdle and the getaway goes spectacularly wrong. Will shoots a cop and the brothers hijack the ambulance the cop has been picked up in. So they have two hostages, the critically injured cop and the sassy paramedic committed to save him.
And so we have a two hour pursuit with car crash, gun play, surgical procedures and military manoeuvres. Good in parts, AMBULANCE suffers from its way too long in the telling. When a character makes a statement about the slowest car chase in history, you go Mmmm, because vital momentum is lost with lame asides and the fumbling of the paramedic role played by Eiza González.
Garrett Dillahunt as principal pursuant policeman is great at channelling Craig McLachlan and our own Olivia Stambouliah shines as his savvy sidekick. It’s a nice pairing and the film would have been aided with more of that team’s presence.
A bloated bombast, AMBULANCE would have been meaner, leaner.