2022's Ambulance is That Rarest and Most Unexpected of Pop Culture Anomalies: A Good Michael Bay Movie
Welcome to the latest entry in The Great Catch-Up, a new feature where I go back and write about the many fascinating, important, great and wonderfully terrible films that have come out since this site was launched back in 2017 that I somehow never got around to writing about. YOU can help determine what I write about for this column by voting in polls at this site’s Patreon page at or by becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas here. Here, the choice was between two new Michael Bay movies: Ambulance or Six Underground. You chose Ambulance.
They say that everything and everyone becomes respectable with time except for politicians and sex workers. That certainly seems to apply to filmmakers. We haven’t quite reached a point where the toxic team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are heralded as misunderstood comic geniuses. I similarly wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the vanity projects of Eric Schaeffer to enter the National Film Registry en masse.
But Michael Bay, who was once perhaps the single most hated living filmmaker, has now become a weird cult filmmaker with a small but devoted following that sees him as a vulgar auteur and pulp poet.
It didn’t necessarily become cool to become a Bay fan but a dedicated group of contrarians and stubborn populists made a case for Bay as an artist and an entertainer and not just as someone who makes studios obscene amounts of money.
I was once one of those dreary critics who saw in Bay everything that was obnoxious, grating and mercenary about big budget American filmmaking. That was for a good reason. For much of his career Bay has represented everything that’s obnoxious, grating and mercenary about big budget American filmmaking.
But there are screenplays for which Bay’s more-is-more, purposefully excessive aesthetic is perfectly suited. There are movies that Bay was born to make.
I’m talking about movies like 2022’s Ambulance. It was that rarest and most unexpected of pop culture entities: a good Michael Bay movie. A filmmaker who had been a punching bag for critics for decades got his best reviews since 1996’s The Rock.
Bay may believe that bigger is better but Ambulance is ingratiatingly modest by the filmmaker’s gargantuan standards. It’s a throwback to the claustrophobic thrills of Speed and its many imitators. Think of it as a poor man’s Speed or a very wealthy man’s Chill Factor.
Bay’s uncharacteristically non-terrible remake of the 2005 Danish thriller of the same name stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will Sharp, a former Marine and Afghanistan veteran with a Cancer-stricken wife in desperate need for an experimental surgery that her insurance will not cover.
Making Will a veteran lets audiences know that he possesses a certain set of skills but also that he has certain qualities associated with the military as well, such as courage, grace under fire and patriotism.
That is, of course, if a character’s mind and psyche has not been shattered by the trauma of warfare. Will has more than his share of problems but this is a Michael Bay movie so even though our shameful lack of universal health care is the film’s real villain there’s never any doubt that police officers and soldiers are the good guys and also that the United States is the finest country on the big blue marble we call Earth.
One of Bay’s signatures is sun light glistening through a majestic American flag fluttering proudly in the wind. It’s an intensely corny, stereotypical expression of patriotism but it’s also one with a certain cheesy power.
Bay really seems to believe in this ridiculous country and the lies that it tells itself. Why shouldn’t he? It’s made him rich, famous and powerful beyond his wildest imagination. Capitalism and the American Way might not have worked out great for you, or me, or Will, but it did wonders for Bay. That helps explain why the film can be so unthinkingly patriotic despite centering on a character who has been failed my the military and our abysmal healthcare system.
In desperation Will turns to his adopted brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for help. Danny says that he can help his brother from another mother from another race but at the steepest of costs.
The wild-eyed maniac and prolific bank robber has his eyes on his biggest and most dangerous score to date, a thirty-two million dollar blockbuster that conveniently requires a driver.
Driving just about anything on two wheels happens to be part of Will’s skillset so he reluctantly agrees to go along with the heist because it could mean the difference between life and death for his wife.
The robbery is going smoothly until newbie cop Officer Zach (Jackson White) notices that something is off when he visits the bank to ask a teller out, which is both cute and also very unprofessional.
Officer Zach pays a terrible price for his lack of professionalism when he ends up getting shot and must endure a hell ride inside an ambulance that Danny and Will have stolen and repurposed as a getaway vehicle.
Eiza González costars as Camille "Cam" Thompson, the person fourth person inside the titular vehicle. She’s a paramedic who once had a promising future as a doctor and a doctor boyfriend before an addiction to speed robbed her of both.
Ambulance follows Will, Danny, Cam and Zach as they are pursued by seemingly half of the LAPD, including its entire fleet of helicopters as well as FBI agent Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell), a veteran who has some insight on the bank robbers because he went to school with Danny.
At one point Anson casually mentions that he has a husband at home. The wonderful thing about the character’s homosexuality is that it does not matter in the least. It’s just another aspect of who he is as a person and that feels like a wonderful mark of progress.
Ambulance is gloriously devoid of the casual racism, sexism and homophobia that characterizes so much of Bay’s oeuvre. It also blissfully lacks the crude, juvenile humor the filmmaker inexplicably feels the need to insert into his action extravaganzas. Ambulance has elements of humor but they’re rooted in the dark comedy of an absurd and surreal situation rather scatology or racism.
Because Michael Bay is an overgrown Boy Scout everyone is extremely concerned with ensuring that a police officer who has been shot does not die even though he’s in a speeding ambulance being pursued by an army of high-powered vehicles.
The bank robbers need the cop as a hostage and for leverage but there is also a sense that nobody, not even criminals, could possibly want a heroic police officer to lose his life. That’s almost adorable in its willful naiveté but then no one has ever accused Bay of being a sophisticated political thinker, or sophisticated in any sense.
The bank robbing brothers face deadly threats inside and outside of the ambulance. There’s the formidable external danger of the FBI and police bearing down on them but also the internal danger that the cop will die before he can be saved.
Gyllenhaal is never better than when he’s playing absolute bastards. He has enormous fun devouring copious scenery here as a maniac who isn’t about to let anything get in the way of realizing his larcenous ambitions.
Bay has always been dependent on the cheap but potent allure of star-power. Just as The Rock wouldn’t work without the pairing of Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, Ambulance’s success is dependent, in no small part, on Gylenhaal’s flash and Abdul-Mateen II’s quiet authority.
Bay lends the proceedings a sense of relentless forward movement; the extreme angles, quick cuts and emphasis on visceral excitement over coherence gives the movie a comic book quality.
It turns out that Bay is eminently qualified to make a nifty b movie if given the right ingredients and everything came together here to create one of the incontrovertible highlights of its director’s checkered and oft-maligned career.
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