Despite the best efforts of film circles, Michael Bay still makes films, and, subsequently, he is forced to remind the world at least once a decade that he often makes good ones. This shouldn’t feel like such a hot take at this point, given how his influence is felt in action cinema, but, again, Bay’s unreasonably hated by a good portion of those who pride themselves upon their taste being “elevated.” From his coming-out in the ’90s with the one-two punch of The Rock and Armageddon, his joyous celebration of chaos and evil in Bad Boys II, to Pain & Gain, an ambitious small-scale true-crime tale released in the midst of his imprisonment within the Transformers jail, there’s more than enough there to make him deserving of his own Cinemetal T-Shirt (it would totally be Aerosmith, right?), though you can assume that only the truly brave would be caught wearing it to a Rainer Werner Fassbender retrospective at the IFC Center. His new film, Ambulance, a remake of a Danish thriller, is perhaps the best stress test of critical mettle: It’s a two-hour-and 20-minute car chase, packed to the gills with the things that make Bay an essential component of the American cinematic landscape with few of the ones that inspire such derision. It’s a weirdly and wonderfully empathetic film, full of love for its characters no matter what side of the law they fall upon and the city of Los Angeles itself, as much as one can be when cars are smashing into one another and guys are getting crushed by armored vehicles.
Like most other Bay films, Ambulance is joyfully high-concept, with a plotline that can be easily delineated in a single sentence: fleeing a botched heist, two bank robbers hijack an ambulance, with the EMT and her patient still in the back, and try to flee the rapidly-encroaching tendrils of law enforcement dedicated to stopping them. It’s in the details that it becomes much more complex: the crooks are siblings raised by an infamously cruel bank robber, both straining to overcome their father’s influence. Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the mastermind behind the heist, a cool and calculating professional criminal with charisma to spare, who believes that through cunning and intelligence, he can accomplish what his dad did without resorting to small-arms fire. Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), his adopted brother, tried to escape that world entirely, joining the Marines fresh out of high school and moving on, only to be brought back to the underworld when his health insurance denies his wife an experimental treatment for her terminal illness. Neither thinks they’re the kind of person who would indiscriminately kill, but a slippery trigger finger during the getaway gravely injures a cop who just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The ambulance comes for him, and the pair see their chance to escape incognito when the flashing lights bounce off of the walls in the underground parking garage they’re trapped in. It’s staffed by Cam (Eiza Gonzalez), an EMT who tries her hardest not to give a damn about the emotional aspects of her job because it’ll get in the way of her being able to save lives speedily. Of course, things go south quickly: the SIS discovers they’re in the ambulance, and their chief (Garret Dillahunt) demands their heads on a pike, a request that’s complicated by the fact that there’s a wounded cop and, to a lesser extent, Cam in the back. He thinks it’ll be easy enough, but he doesn’t quite understand that he’s dealing with Danny, who is laying a trap for him and his men at the same time as the chief is trying to lure him into ones of his own devising. As such, cars go boom real nice.
Cinematically, Bay’s style remains largely unchanged, though his hyperkinetic focus on editing for pace has rarely been used to this specific suspenseful effect. Even without the constant cuts, with shots coming and going within a snap of one’s fingers, his camera is always moving, keeping the viewer off-center and at ill-ease, making them feel the stress that is consuming everyone involved in the chase on-screen: it’s sweaty and tense, full of adrenaline and paranoia. Though he still favors the traditional smash-mouth playbook, there’s one key addition to his normal action cinematography that has an oversized effect on how he structures his sequences, and, to be fair, it’s a killer fucking app. Drone shots have become the bane of documentary filmmaking, especially within true crime, replacing the helicopter shot with a low-fi equivalent, but Bay may be one of the first action filmmakers to take the kind of drone cinematography one might see in an ESPN2 racing exhibition and use it for his own purposes.
There’s sweeping, impeccably choreographed camera movement here, with the drone-mounted camera moving effortlessly between speeding and crashing cars and up and down skyscrapers, which renders the mayhem with herky-jerky poetry. Add to that a sonorous and thundering sound design — which very well may shake ceiling tiles free from the Dolby-branded theater sound system should you be lucky enough to see it in that format — and you get a theatrical experience that overwhelms with its raw power, searching for and subsequently destroying any cell of yours in either eye or ear that isn’t properly up to muster for maximum Bayhem at its most laser-guided. It’s almost all action, all the time, and you’ll barely get a chance to breathe.
Given the comparable lack of scatological humor and nihilism here (though there is some of both, with the former being represented in Dillahunt’s massive dog’s unwitting involvement in the chase at one point), Ambulance feels it’ll bear the marker of being Bay’s most accessible and/or traditional film, which is both probably correct and a massive insult to his plentiful contributions to cinema over the past three decades. He’s a Son of Tony Scott, who, along with his brother Ridley, took the “realer than real” hype-stylization of advertising and applied it to elevate multiplex fare. Where Scott and Bay separate is in effect: Scott intended to awe the viewer with the majesty of his compositions enhanced through the power of kinetic editing, Bay chose shock-and-awe to jolt life back into the viewer, as if he were defibrillating them with the sheer voltage of cinema itself. He’s always stimulating something, trying his best to keep you awake and engaged while making you feel like you got your money’s worth, and that includes revulsion and straddling the boundaries of good taste. In a lot of ways, his films are invaluable contributions to the historical record: Here is our national id, presented to us without pretension, in the same sense that the graffiti that lined the walls of Pompeii — in which shit, pubes, and anal sex were common topics — reflected Roman culture unencumbered by the propriety of the rich and powerful and the preservation of their dignity. He is a poet of rot, a symptom of our national ills, and, of course, people hate him because he reflects their culture at its most honest.
So what does one make of the fact that Ambulance is, at its core, a… kind and reasonably empathetic Michael Bay film? Perhaps after gazing into the abyss that was 6 Underground, Bay needed to come up for air, to do something a little smaller and more reasonable compared to the eternal awesome evil that was that film. Or, maybe, our world has caught up to him — there’s an inherent nihilism to our world and politics nowadays that feels Bay-esque, unencumbered by Bush-era patriotism and the niceties of our values, where the lunatic fringe feels overrepresented among the rank-and-file and even the most average and outgoing people have been forced by circumstance into becoming antisocial. If Ambulance is actually about anything, it’s about cool competence under pressure — represented by Gonzales, who is put through the wringer over the course of this film and who never loses sight of her purpose and goal — and the consequences of underestimating those around you and your own capabilities, even if you think you’re well-aware and cognizant of yourself and the world at large. Both of those themes feel equally applicable to Bay’s filmography: It takes a master tactician able to lead an army of second-units and stunt drivers and camera ops, which by any measure he is, even to his detractors, but he’s also someone who has been perpetually pigeonholed by a dismissive cinephile intelligentsia that is only starting to come around to the fact that his work is of immense value, even on solely aesthetic grounds.
Perhaps that level of hatred has caused him to reflect inward, somewhat, seeing the pain and desperation that brings these people to the point where making this kind of chaos is the only possible way out. Either way, Ambulance is a full-tilt thriller with a surprisingly moving core, sure to be discarded to the rubbish bin of his detractors’ minds once he comes out with something gleefully unhinged once again, unless they can change their hearts and minds as well.