Ambulance Movie Review

The explosive director Michael Bay returns to the big screen with his newest movie Ambulance. We follow war veteran Will Sharp who takes up a job with his brother Danny to steal $32 million from an LA bank in order to pay for his wife’s life-saving operation. Things quickly go wrong and the brothers hijack an ambulance carrying a wounded cop and an EMT, which leads to them being in a high speed chase all over LA. I was unprepared for the utter “Bayhem” that Ambulance dished out to me, leading to a surprisingly fun time at the movies.

I knew Ambulance was going to be chock full of action sequences, but I wasn’t ready for the level of intensity behind it. With approximately 15 minutes of setup, the movie gets into an hour and 45 minute straight action sequences filled with car crashes, gun fights and explosions. This movie takes its R rating SERIOUSLY. I couldn’t handle it when the movie actually showed the characters performing surgery on the wounded cop, as if being in a car chase wasn’t enough. It was impossible for me to be bored with the amount of wild action like that. 

The action wasn’t the only thing carrying this movie: we get powerful performances by the cast. Yahya-Abdul Mateen II as Will Sharp does incredible work showing how desperate his character is to save his wife. This makes him an extremely sympathetic character for me to get behind. Jake Gyllenhall as Danny Sharp was a fun terror to watch as he made Danny a sporadic cillain—cool and confident in one scene to panicky and hot tempered in the next. This kept me on the edge because I never knew what he was going to do or say next. Finally we have Eiza Gonzalez as the EMT Cam Thompson who had the emotional output of a brick wall, but it worked for her character. As an EMT, Cam saw horrible injuries and deaths, all of which made her numb. You also see Cam’s humanity slowly return to her as she is being held hostage throughout the movie, leaving you with an enjoyable character arc made even better by Gonzalez’s performance.

How Ambulance is filmed is its greatest flaw though, as someone thought it was a good idea to give Michael Bay a drone camera. These drone shots were mainly used for the chase scenes but the chase is a majority of the movie. Ambulance also has seemingly thousands of jump cuts, which combined with the drone shots, gives you both a splitting headache and motion sickness.

If you stomach through the filming and editing, Ambulance is still a fun time at the movies. Hopefully you won’t need an ambulance by the time it’s over.