‘Ambulance’ movie review: Bay’s back with the ultimate adrenaline rush

There is a special joy in surrendering to all the impossibilities that are omnipresent in Michael Bay movies

Watching  Ambulance creates a desperate nostalgia for ‘90s style action movies. And who better than Michael Bay to create that particular hit of adrenaline with eye-stabbing cuts, humour, exquisite cars, thumping base notes and a camera that is as much a character as the actors?  

Bay’s lasting outing,  6 Underground, was hampered by the size of the screen (it streamed on Netflix) and always seemed to be threatening to leap out of it. Here on IMAX, the car chases, the dizzying pullbacks from mayhem on the street to a sneaker slowly revolving from the roof (don’t ask) and the emergency surgery to take out a bullet lodged in the spleen of a character inside a moving ambulance during a high-speed chase makes so much sense.  

There is a special joy in surrendering to all the impossibilities — the White Queen was surely thinking of Michael Bay’s movies when she told Alice she sometimes believed “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  

Based on a 2005 Danish film by Laurits Munch-Petersen and Lars Andreas Pedersen,  Ambulance tells the story of William Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a decorated Marine who approaches his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for help when his wife, Amy (Moses Ingram) is diagnosed with cancer and the insurance will not cover the experimental surgery.  

Danny tells William he cannot help him, but offers him a place on his latest job — stealing 32 million dollars from an LA bank. Do banks even have that kind of money nowadays... besides the point. Danny tells William it is an in-and-out sweet deal that just cannot go wrong — uh oh.  

On the other side of town is EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González), the best in the business who nobody wants to partner with. And there is also a police officer, Zack (Jackson White) who has a crush on the bank teller, and is persuaded to ask her out on a date at the exact same time the heist is in progress. 

The heist naturally goes spectacularly wrong with one of the naughty bank robbers getting squashed by the getaway van; that is what happens when you wear Birkenstocks to a bank robbery. The brothers decide to cut and run with their share of the loot and decide to use the ambulance taking Zack to the hospital to beat the police cordon.