AMBULANCE
If there were one word to describe Michael Bay’s AMBULANCE (stylized as ambuLAnce across marketing materials because it follows an ambulance…in LA…keep up!)— it would simply be iconic. Without giving any context, there is an actual scene around the midpoint of this film where our main characters get on a group FaceTime with two trauma surgeons (who are calling in from a golf course, mind you) to learn how to perform an emergency surgery to retrieve a bullet from another character's spleen. I am almost certain that if you showed this scene to a pilgrim, they would immediately collapse.
AMBULANCE (trailer here) is overstimulating, nonsensical, graphically violent, deeply moving and hilariously chaotic—all at once. You must see it immediately. Based on the 2005 Danish film AMBULANCEN, ambuLAnce’s premise is simple: A struggling veteran, Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), needs to pay his sick wife’s medical bills. He goes to his adoptive brother Danny (an exceedingly manic Jake Gyllenhaal), a career criminal wanted by the FBI, to help him rob a bank for $32 million. Of course, everything that could go wrong during the heist does, and after Will shoots a police officer, they hijack an ambulance and take the hardened, unemotional Cam (Eiza Gonzalez)—the Self-Proclaimed Best Paramedic In Town—hostage. As Cam works against the clock to keep the police officer alive in this careening getaway ambulance, Will and Danny drive across LA trying to mastermind a way out of their botched heist. Michael Bay’s maximalist filmmaking is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I, for one, am kind of obsessed. The swooping drone shots, practical explosions, and simple dialogue scenes that look like they were shot on a 120mm lens all work in service of the absurd, high-octane premise at hand. AMBULANCE demands your attention for every second of its 2 hour 16 minute runtime. And truthfully, not a lot of movies have that to their credit. There’s some wonky “both sides” socio political commentary going on here, but that honestly just made the movie that much more fun. So please…like my life depends on it, go see Michael Bay’s ambuLAnce this weekend—and thank me later.
—Neal Mulani, Development Assistant
