Before the major chasing and shooting gets underway, the titular vehicle and its heroic E.M.T., Cam Thompson (Eiza González), attend to a young car-accident victim who has been impaled on a piece of wrought-iron fence. This kind of mishap is a staple of shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “9-1-1,” and “Ambulance” can be seen as a sustained critique of television’s domesticated presentation of disaster. Cam saves the child in the morning and by the time rush hour rolls around is performing emergency abdominal surgery in the middle of a car chase while conferring with trauma surgeons via video chat. Exploding cars and an exploding spleen, cut together in perfect counterpoint: that’s cinema, kids.
So are the wild vertical drone shots in which the camera rockets skyward before plunging back to earth, a carnival-ride move that Bay adds to his repertoire of swooping, ricocheting, vertiginous effects. And so, finally, is the story, an old-fashioned concatenation of coincidences, collisions and foolproof plans gone horribly awry.
At the center is a daylight robbery that plucks $32 million from a bank — a modest haul compared with the $100 million Ed Harris was after in “The Rock” back in 1996, especially when you adjust for inflation. The main robbers are Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who grew up as brothers, raised by a criminal father. Flashbacks show their boyhood selves at play, but as grown-ups they have taken diverging paths. Danny followed in Dad’s footsteps, while Will joined the Marines. Now married (to Moses Ingram) with an infant son, he’s desperate for money to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment. Stopping by Danny’s place of business to ask for a loan, he ends up signing on with Danny’s crew.
Eventually they are joined by two hostages: Cam and a rookie cop named Zach (Jackson White), whose partner, Mark (Cedric Sanders), becomes part of an elaborate tour of the freeways and alleys of Los Angeles that also involves a lot of other people on both sides of the law. It all ends up pretty much where you expect it will, but the actors do a good job of seething and emoting under pressure, and Gyllenhaal does a volatile, charming sociopath thing that isn’t as annoying as it might be.
So after much deliberation, my critical verdict on “Ambulance” is: It’s a movie!
Ambulance
Rated R. F-bombs, exploding cars, a ruptured spleen. Running time: 2 hour 16 minutes. In theaters.
