Ambulance review: Michael Bay goes full-crazy in a wildly adrenalized action throwback

Early on in Ambulance, a minor character, a cop, starts riffing on an old Sean Connery quote from the 1996 action thriller The Rock. "You know, The Rock?" he prods his partner, a rookie just out of the academy. "Yeah, he was a wrestler," the partner replies happily, "Then he became an actor." Of course this kid doesn't know that it's the name of a Michael Bay movie, why would he? He probably wasn't born yet.

He also probably wouldn't know how very Bay Ambulance (in theaters Friday) is: way Bay, peak bay, Bay über alles. That is to say, at one point someone will squeeze a human spleen until it bursts, and someone else, two people actually, will sing Christopher Cross's yacht-rock apotheosis "Sailing" during a high-speed police chase in off-key harmony. Many day-rate extras will die anonymous explosive deaths, but the hero will survive bombs, bazookas, and a tank. And all will follow the first law of the Bay Cinematic Universe: If a thing can go boom, it will go boom.

Ambulance is also, it turns out, better than most of the movies in Bay's catalog, though the bar for Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and five Transformers arguably has only itself to clear. Better in that it immediately sets the dial at 11, action-wise, and stays there, constantly defibrillating, for the next 130-plus minutes. And better in that its leads are played by two actors who work far more than they probably need to to sell this particular brand of rococo madness. Jake Gyllenhaal is Danny Sharp, a maniacally cheerful freelance bandit; Yahya Abdul Mateen II (Candyman, The Matrix Resurrections) is his adopted brother Will, a former marine with a wife and new baby. (Their late father, it is mentioned several times, was a criminal and a "total psycho"; how he ended up taking in Will remains a mystery, but we're not here to sweat the details.)

Though the brothers are semi-estranged and seemingly live in different worlds, Bay and screenwriter Chris Fedak (Prodigal Son, DC's Legends of Tomorrow) dispense breezily with Will's motivation in the first scene: He's a veteran, broke and unsupported by the country he served, and his wife needs experimental surgery they can't afford. So hey, phone a friend! Conveniently, Danny has a job planned for that very afternoon, a $32 million drop in downtown Los Angeles. Never mind that his crew is so casually ill-prepared for a heist that one shaggy Z-boy arrives in open-toed sandals ("Who wears Birkenstocks to a bank robbery, Trent?").

When things go awry, as they do, Will and Danny are forced to flee the scene in an ambulance with a critically injured cop (Jackson White) and an EMT named Cam (I Care a Lot's Eiza González) on board, and the entire air, land, and sea fleet of the LAPD in hot pursuit. There's an ornery police captain (Garret Dillahunt, who looks very much like Josh Duhamel but isn't), his impatient lieutenant (Olivia Stambouliah), and an FBI agent (Keir O'Donnell) with the clearest read on Danny and a husband who just wants him to come home.

There's also some ambiguous business with a short-fused crime lord (A Martinez) everybody calls Papi, but the dramatic thrust of the movie mostly takes place behind the wheel, while the passengers bicker and bargain and attempt to perform several ill-advised emergency medical procedures. Bay shoots these scenes as if he's just been injected with several kinds of lightning, the camera swooping and corkscrewing at seasick angles over freeways and fireballs and blaring California sunshine. And Gyllenhaal, fully going for baroque, seems almost giddy, throwing off one liners like they're beads at Mardi Gras and making Nic Cage crazy eyes.

Gonzalez, infuriated and blood-spattered, gets more to do than the average decorative female in a film like this, somehow without losing her lip gloss, and Abdul-Mateen II imbues Will with far more pathos and humanity than his hasty sketch of a character deserves. It all goes on too long and eventually wears itself out (the 2005 Danish original on which the screenplay is based clocks in almost a full hour shorter). The violence is cartoonishly casual and the ending pure Hollywood corn. The absurdity, though, is the point: They're just two brothers on the run, and escape is what we came for. Grade: B

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