Ambulance - A Movie Review

Are you telling me you never had a backup plan when we stole this ambulance?

Following a car chase, Ambulance burst into theaters in 2022. Two brothers steal an ambulance. Racing around the streets of L.A. holding a paramedic hostage, the men are chased and told to stop with their heist.

Ambulance is a cross between a comedy and an instantaneous action film that keeps your eyes locked to the screen. As soon as I watched the preview, I was looking forward to it. Hindering a few flaws, Ambulance should have concentrated more on the main characters than side stories.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II were excellent. Adapting to the stressful situation, both actors attained their own backstories for their characters. They also garnered heavy stress, barking out intense orders.

Gyllenhaal is so wired that he is bouncing off the walls. I thought his eyes were going to fall out of his sockets at one point with how wide he opened them. Gyllenhaal has the craziest lines of dialogue bickering about nicknames or how medical tools work.

The dynamic between the siblings is the most important part of the film. It’s not given the center focus. There is so much action going on that it’s hard to concentrate on the story at hand. In my opinion, the story should have taken place in the ambulance the entire time. Scenes outside the ambulance took away from the film.

Ambulance has a big ensemble of actors. Garret Dillahunt, Keir O’Donnell, Jackson White, Olivia Stambouliah, Moses Ingram, and more. There’s too much cutting to side characters. These characters were more for comic relief. A lot of officers bicker about the situation and it includes moments between the bad guys.

For less than thirty seconds, there is this therapy scene between a couple and one of their parents. Introducing one side character, it’s so random and is never brought up again. Truthfully, we already had comic relief between Gyllenhaal and Abdul-Mateen II.

Eiza Gonzalez was wonderful. I was not expecting her character thinking that the story would only focus on the leads. Trapped as a hostage, Cam has to go beyond the call of duty. Some of her reactions were unrealistic, but Gonzolez did an excellent job with her character's emotional range.

A lot of action ensues in Ambulance. It starts to lose its stream but never in the ambulance scenes. I like how Michael Bay instituted these scenes. Something happened in every scene to move the story forward. No elements were repeated during these sequences. It would have made the film boring if the same content or dialogue was repeated.

Haphazardly chucking the camera around in random directions, closing up intensely on characters, and fast cuts, Bay made sure that his direction matched the chaotic atmosphere. I liked this one shot of the camera falling down this skyscraper to get a view of the city.

I was laughing out loud a couple of times in the theater. I wasn’t alone there. Sometimes the comedy was a distraction from the main action. There were scenes that could have been cut. It is long.

Ambulance is a violent film. For anyone triggered by guns, blood, or hostage situations, this is not the film for you. It barely gives you a break to breathe. A graphic surgery is performed that will make audiences squick but could make doctors laugh if it was medically accurate.

Once the credits rolled, I took a breath. If you like action then put Ambulance on your list. It’s a wild ride in the cinema.