Ambulance is an outdated 5/10 movie... a VERY 5/10 movie.

After the furore that was the John Wick franchise we've seen a change in the action film. Long gone are the generically rough voiced white knights and now we have made room for characters with a lot more nuance and relatable motives. Ambulance tries to follow, but unfortunately falls flat.

I have noticed a recent trend amongst action films to try and give their characters a more solid motivation for why they act in the way they do. John Wick is a man who fell into unfortunate circumstances after having the only peace in his life ripped away from him twice, the 'Fast' franchise focuses on familial love (Just a tad) and Amazon Prime's recent 'Without Remorse' made attempts at giving their main character nuance (whether or not this worked is up to you). These are things we, as an audience, can empathise more with. So I found it HEAVILY surprising that, of all directors, Michael Bay (sploder-man) decided to add his take to the more 'relatable' action hero.

Michael Bay is a director notorious for explosions and his signature 360 internal panorama shots. Explosions will forever tickle that youthful part of all our minds but I've noticed that action films have very much moved away from the 'Bay' style of directing so I was incredibly curious to see how a modern Bay would adjust to a modern crowd... he didn't.

Based on the poorly reviewed 2005 film ‘Ambulancen’, the film opens with a very weak attempt at trying to garner sympathy for it’s 3 protagonists; Wills (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) very overplayed motivation of ‘medical bills for my wife idk’ feels like a very generic copout. ESPECIALLY considering that Will’s wife seems very healthy and we don’t even hear what this ‘experimental’ surgery is. An EMT (Eiza Gonzalez) who will do anything to save someone, no matter the cost, and Jake Gyllenhall, who I don’t think took this movie seriously at all. Three weak attempts by Michael Bay and Chris Fedak to create empathetic characters that feel incredibly uninspired. They almost hit the mark with Eiza Gonzales’ character but, as has been well documented before, I really don’t believe that Michael Bay understands how to direct a female lead (look at every Transformers movie). She should be this badass nurse who stays calm in the face of adversity but they wrote her to be a panicky ‘mother-like’ figure who is actually a terrible EMT (more on this in another post about her character, which irked me).

The film feels ultimately dated. Almost as if I picked it up from my dad's DVD binder and put it into my Xbox 360. Even the font (yes… the font) feels like it’s from 2013. The camera work is very boringly Michael Bay, the same shots, the same angles, the same colouring all what we’ve come to expect from a director with such prestige. However, I believe one of his kids must have shown him that tiktok of the guy dancing to ‘Stay’ by Justin Bieber as a drone circles him because oh my good lord there are SO MANY drone shots in this film. And honestly… I dont't hate it.

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug and if you are someone around my age (who skirts the line between millennial and Gen-Z) I really believe you will be reminded of the paint by numbers action films that we grew up with. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. For all its terrible characters and generic plot, the action scenes are fun and coherent. The car chases, explosions and gun fights all get an added layer of tension via the police officer they need to keep alive in the ambulance (which would work better if I cared about another generic white man with an asian fetish).

If the film did more to actually make us care about all 4 characters in the ambulance then it would be far more riveting than it is. I think of scenes in Money Heist where life saving surgery is done at gunpoint and the tension lies within our empathy for the characters and this film just did not create a single ounce of empathy for anybody. Which is a real shame because it should be tense.

Ultimately I think Michael Bay’s style of directing is outdated and doesn’t really have a place in a world where we get great action movies like John Wick and The Raid 1/2. Netflix is making it far easier to access the FANTASTIC world of the East/Central asian Kung-Fu renaissance and Michael Bay just feels weak and stale in comparison.

Final Thoughts: Watch it in Dolby Atmos or just wait for it to come to streaming.