Movie Review: 'Ambulance' is an Early Worst of 2022 Contender

Ambulance is a singularly insipid entry in the canon of spectacle director Michael Bay. The action movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul Mateen II set mostly inside an ambulance provides no suspense, stock characters, and a bizarre approach to story logic. A pair of adopted brothers go in on a bank heist and wind up with hostages in an ambulance, including a dying Police Officer, and somehow a movie with this premise has no excitement whatsoever.

Ambulance stars Yahya Abdul Mateen II as Will Sharp, an ex-military man with a new baby and dying wife. Will’s wife, who has about 6 lines of dialogue, needs an experimental surgery that Will cannot afford and the government won’t even talk to him about covering it. Bay clumsily introduces the government as a stock villain in the piece by having Will on the phone with a nameless and careless woman who tells him she can’t talk about his dying wife because she has a break starting. This is nakedly intended to get Will off the hook with us for becoming a criminal to get the money for the surgery.

Desperate, Will turns to the one person in his life he should not turn to, his no good brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). Danny happens to have an immediate solution to Will’s troubles. He happens to be just leaving to commit a massive bank robbery worth $32 million dollars. Sure, because when you are pulling off an intricate crime based on planning and execution it’s always a good idea to bring in a guy who has no idea what your plan is or how to execute it. Somehow, no one seems overly bothered by a stranger joining their bank heist crew at literally the last minute.

The bank robbery goes surprisingly smoothly until a dopey looking rookie cop shows up wanting to ask out one of the bank tellers. Despite Danny pretending to be a bank employee and explaining that they are doing a major transfer in the back, the cop insists on coming in. Naturally, this leads to him discovering the robbery and screwing up this perfectly calibrated plan. Or did it? You see, Ambulance is such a dunderheaded movie that there is a plot introduced involving someone on Danny’s crew being an informant.

The problem is, the plot is so haphazardly introduced that you’d be forgiven if you completely missed that. The cop plot should be enough to kick the plot off but Bay can’t help himself from introducing superfluous and entirely unnecessary characters to pad out the runtime and relieve him of the challenge of trying to make a movie with only the characters in the ambulance. A real filmmaker might embrace the challenge and make a shorter movie that focuses on what should be a remarkably tense showdown between the EMT hostage, played by Eliza Gonzalez, the injured dopey cop who is bleeding out, and the bank robbers who’ve hijacked the ambulance.

Ah, but that movie would require innovations in character and style that Michael Bay is not capable of. It would also mean he would have to cut back on his explosion budget and what a crime THAT would be if Michael Bay weren’t blowing things up real good. Who cares if the explosions of violence are needed or not, they exist to make up for Bay’s complete disinterest in creating characters or telling stories.

I am a huge fan of both Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul Mateen and the massive failure of Ambulance is not their fault. The blame for this ramshackle, chaotic, dopey mess of an action movie falls squarely on Michael Bay who took a good premise, bank robbers taking hostages in an ambulance and botches it spectacularly in order to bend it to his slick expensive style of action movie. In the vast multiverse another director made the movie that Ambulance should be, a tense, fast paced, 85 minute movie set entirely inside a hijacked ambulance following a high stakes bank robbery. Oh how I wish we were all in that universe instead of the one where Michael Bay makes such a mess of this idea.

Ambulance opened in theaters nationwide on April 8th, 2022.