After a bank heist goes awry, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) are forced to hijack an ambulance to make their getaway.  Things go from bad to worse when they realize that EMT Cam (Eiza González) was enroute to the hospital with an injured cop, Zach (Jackson White), in the back.  The criminal duo is torn between trying to shake their massive police tail to make their getaway, while also making sure they can keep Zach alive so as to lessen their sentence if they get caught. 

From Universal Studios comes Ambulance, a high-octane thriller from Michael Bay written by Chris Fedak, based off of Laurits Munch-Petersen’s 2005 Danish film of the same name.  Fedak makes his leap from television to film with this script, and with its 136-minute runtime and twisting plotlines, the film suffers from the excess that can work better in a season-length arc.  Much of the film is a police chase so stopping the action would be detrimental to what successes it does have, but trimming down the runtime would have greatly improved the end result.  To put it into perspective, Munch-Petersen’s film runs a lean 80 minutes. 

The other frustrating aspect of the script is that it thinks it is so much smarter than it actually is.  There are conversations between the characters late in the film that are trying to prop Ambulance as some sort of moral parable.  Bay is shameless in setting up Will as a veteran father who has been failed by the system upon returning home from combat, but Bay’s billowing American flag patriotism only goes skin deep.  Then there is Danny who goes so far as to say “we are not the bad guys” and nothing could be further from the truth.  There is potential there for this to become a morality play, but it is not supported at all by Danny’s actions.  It could also have been used as a vehicle to highlight the continued poor treatment of our veterans by the country they put their lives on the line to serve, but again the script uses that as an easy way to get us to sympathize with Will.  

One of the saving graces of the film are the main performances by the crew on the ambulance.  Gyllenhaal brings his specific brand on manic energy to the film and it works quite well. Even if it does become a little one note as the film drags on, the actor is absolutely unhinged and keeps us engaged with the film even if just on a cursory level.  He is tempered down by the much more levelheaded Abdul-Mateen.  Will is, unfortunately, very poorly written and used as sympathy bait instead of being fleshed out into a true character, but Abdul-Mateen manages to bring humanity into this otherwise thin character and helps move the more interesting elements of the plot – the shifting character dynamics in the high stress environment – forward in the second half of the film. 

Opposite the bank robbers is Cam, and to a lesser degree the injured Zach.  An argument can be made that this is really Cam’s film and González is very competent on screen.  While many of the medical decisions made are so farfetched to be believable it breaks the flow of the scene, she still manages to sell the absurdity enough in the moment that it never fully derails the film.  White’s Zach is a pretty thankless role finding the young actor spending most of his time knocked out on the stretcher, but he is a likeable enough presence that we do find ourselves hoping that he makes it out alive. 

There are two other forces at work in Ambulance who are both bumbling and, as with the rest of the film, over complicated for very little reason.  On the police side of things, Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) leads the charge and acts more like a never-grown-up frat boy while Special Agent Clark (Keir O’Donnell) is made out to be some yippy outsider.  The personality clash between the two department heads is unnecessary and serves little to no purpose.  Looking at the details, it is clear these personalities were constructed to be ethically deep, but it does not work because it is ingenuine in its conception and downright boring.  Working to help Will and Danny is a gang led by a man who goes simply as Papi (A Martinez) and the entire crew is little more than a stereotypical amalgamation that, again, adds little to the plot.  The way that everyone connects to each other as well as the very carefully casted mix of race, age, and identity makes Ambulance feel like it is trying to be profound, but in reality it is a poor rehashing of the central theme of Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004) wrapped up as an action thriller, yet it fails on both fronts. Even without a comparison, Ambulance has such an undefined philosophy behind it that putting any thought deeper than just a basic understanding of the kineticism of the scene renders the film completely nonsensical.   

For all the weak points on the page, Bay does manage to create some enjoyably tense moments in this otherwise messy film.  The initial bank heist is quite thrilling, and it utilizes Gyllenhaal’s energy and charisma perfectly.  Later on, aboard the racing ambulance, again, Bay shows his acumen for creating set pieces that get the blood pumping in his audience.  Unfortunately, there are two things here that hurt the film: first being Bay’s tendency to cut away from the action for dizzying drone shots zipping up, down, and around the LA skyscrapers before crashing back into the driver’s seat for incredibly shaky close ups.  The second is that many of his set pieces begin to repeat elements of each other.  The law of diminishing returns rings true as seeing a cop car run through a carefully placed shipping pallet of produce and flipping over quickly loses its luster and excitement with each iteration. 

Ambulance is an overlong and bloated script for a simple concept.  Trimming that fat and getting this film down to even just 100 minutes would have greatly improved the experience.  While at once it seems like Bay has little regard for costs in the world of the film – the dry-humored Mobile Lieutenant Dzaghig (Olivia Stambouliah) remaking that “this is an expensive car chase” – the streets are largely kept empty and civilian casualties are few if any, and minimal civilian damage as well.  Had the restraint shown here resonated throughout the rest of the script, Ambulance could have been a very smart piece of action filmmaking with something to say, but as it stands it is overlong and topples into the realm of nonsense in its pursuit of excess.  The only true sigh of relief comes at the end of the film, not so much for our characters but for us as the audiences; the ordeal is finally over, and we can move on with our day.