“Ambulance,” Reviewed: Michael Bay Plays Himself

Michael Bay’s new film, “Ambulance,” which opened in theatres last Friday, is being hailed as an exemplary Michael Bay film: a large-scale delivery device for quick-cut action sequences, explosions, quips, and more explosions. It’s Bay’s first theatrical release in five years, and one of the few non-“Transformers” movies he’s done in fifteen. Yet, despite the Bay imprimatur, the main quality of “Ambulance” is its virtual anonymity. In both his methods and his attitudes, he empties the film of any trace of creative personality. “Ambulance” reminds me of one of the few good films of the misbegotten Dogme 95 movement, “The Boss of It All,” in which the director Lars von Trier used a system that he called Automavision, a computerized control of his camera: “We push this button on the computer and we get given six or eight randomized set-ups—a little tilt, or a movement, or if you should zoom in.” So it is with “Ambulance,” in which Bay sacrifices his modicum of directorial originality in order to whip up a frenzy of mechanized excitement with a story that could have been generated by Automatext.

“Ambulance” is a post-heist movie—the botched bank robbery at its center is merely the pretext for an extended chase. Two brothers in Los Angeles—Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal), a career criminal who’s the ringleader of the job, and Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Marine veteran in need of fast money—are the two survivors of the heist. They get away (toting thirty-two million dollars in cash) by hijacking an ambulance in which an E.M.T. aide, Cam Thompson (Eiza González), is tending to the police officer, Zach (Jackson White), whom Will shot during the escape. The premise of the chase is that only Zach’s grave wounds, and Cam’s exacting care to keep him alive, are restraining the authorities from swooping in and stopping the vehicle. The intrepid Danny, who is on his thirty-eighth bank robbery in ten years, declares, “We’re a shark: we don’t stop.”

The bulk of the film—and bulk it is—is tactical: Will (an expert driver) and Danny take daring, evasive measures; Cam’s formidable medical skills are pressed by Zach’s deteriorating condition; law enforcement, its command split between the crusty Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) and the starchy, young F.B.I. agent Anson Clark (Keir O’Donnell), tracks the robbers and tries to trap them. As Danny makes increasingly bold and complicated plans to elude capture, he sparks conflict with another gang of criminals led by a man known only as Papi (A Martinez), a ruthless agent for drug cartels.

Each of the characters has a salient trait or two to explain his or her actions with a forensic specificity that takes the place of any dramatic curiosity. Yet the script, by Chris Fedak (based on a Danish film from 2005), is gaudily decorative—it adorns the characters with patter and riffs, with extraneous details that simulate the stuff of life without any substance. These verbal ornaments give the actors something to work with, lines to inflect and emotions to contrive, as hectic distractions from the fact that their characters are purely puppets, pulled by the dictatorial strings of plot. The flashy performances are a tribute to the actors’ talent—especially Gyllenhaal, González, Dillahunt, and O’Donnell, who conjure a sense of spin on leaden absurdities. Abdul-Mateen II has the hardest job, because the script gives him even less to work with: Will, a slightly more malleable character, is entirely in the service of filling plot holes, and Bay doesn’t even feign interest in his personality.

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What Bay is up to in “Ambulance” is motion, which isn’t quite the same thing as action. It isn’t enough that there are car crashes—drivers losing control, vehicles losing traction, concrete shards flying at the camera like sand kicked by a beach bully, people scattering and smashing with a casual indifference befitting only clay figures. It isn’t enough, because much of the movie—with its negotiations and decisions, its wrangling and planning—involves talk, and Bay films it to appear continuous with the copious scenes of violence. Even when the characters are sitting still, the camera doesn’t stop moving. The panoply of angles, realized seemingly with handheld cameras subject to jolts from the hazards of the shoot, merely simulates substance and emotion; the images suggest expressive inflections that they don’t actually provide. Moreover, these neutral images are edited together at a pace that’s frenetic even for Bay. The montage offers giant helpings of images, furnishing infinitesimal substance; for the viewer, it’s a mental race to keep up with the jumble—and that jumble is what takes the place of bodily movement. Bay makes generous use of drones to follow vehicles from overhead, but much of the drone footage is similarly ornamental and provisional, swooping between a billboard’s stanchions or gyrating haphazardly around the vehicular drama to splatter the movie with more movement than its characters and vehicles alone can furnish.

The handful-of-confetti approach to cinematic composition matches the skittering script in almost entirely lacking a point of view. The few moments that provide one—overhead surveillance images of the ambulance that show only what the pilots see—do evoke, a few seconds at a time, method and thought. Even the aesthetic sensibility that Bay flaunts in the “Transformers” franchise is mostly missing from “Ambulance,” too—although it’s hinted at, during the robbery scene in the bank lobby, in a few quick shots of characters in closeup from a very low angle that seems to press them against the crosshatched, light-stippled ceiling. It lasts maybe a total of two or three seconds, but it sparks imagination.

It’s the very sense of nothingness, of frantic agitation that surrounds and even distracts from the action, that is the movie’s main distinction. Bay’s images may be empty or trivial, but they do far more to give the film its identity and its substance than the performers do. (One scene, involving a bit of surgical derring-do under pressure, winks at the giddy absurdity of the movie’s entire conceit, brandishing a sense of cartoonish hyperbole that the movie otherwise suppresses.) The whirlwind of empty images of arbitrarily infinitesimal durations taken from an arbitrary abundance of angles suggests the vague desire for anything but realism. For better or worse, Bay is immune to the myth of cinematic transparency, the belief that it suffices to depict an action in a plain, unadorned way in order to capture its substance, significance, and physicality. That’s why Bay, at his best, is a lighthearted cynic, a casual ironist, whether expressing his tall-tale delight in inexcusable dimness, in “Pain & Gain,” or, in the “Transformers” franchise, his sensual delight in aestheticizing its trivialities.

In “Ambulance,” however, Bay tries to have it both ways. He takes the plotting very seriously, burdens characters with earnest motives and troubles, yet presents them in a throwaway style and allows them no self-expression, no identity. The movie is indifferent to the humanity of its characters, is detached from the realities of its recognizable setting, and takes a nearly pornographic delight in the depiction of pain and discomfort. If the movie has any merit at all, it’s in the seemingly unintentional mockery of the conventions and styles of far more purposeful and intention-laden films. In its chaotic whirl of tinsel images, it thumbs its nose at the kind of plain realism that too often passes as synonymous with sincerity. Yet Bay’s substitute for realism isn’t imagination or fantasy but merely unrealism. His naïve insolence punctures the vanities of other filmmakers while offering no alternative, and the movie that results is a joyless, confused self-abnegation.