Ambulance  ★★★½

DO YOU remember the 1994 action thriller Speed?

Michael Bay does and his latest, Ambulance, could safely be described as ‘Speed on speed’, such is the non-stop, propulsive and chaotic formula employed.

Bay has been much-maligned by many critics over his career, sometimes for legitimate reasons, but there is no doubting the popularity and skill that has gone into previous efforts like Bad Boys I and II, The Rock, Armageddon, 13 Hours and a couple of his early Transformers films.

The American’s films are full of alpha males behaving badly in scenarios that require maximum damage to the bad guys and any surrounding property that gets in the way. Schooled in his early years on a constant staple of music video direction, Bay took the style into movies and has never changed.

Apart from the odd explosion, Bay has little interest in long, establishing shots. His camera is constantly on the move, apart from a couple of scenes in the first ten minutes of Ambulance to help introduce us to the two main characters.

From there Ambulance is pure Bay with more cutting than your average lawn mower and constant, frantic movement that suggests the entire cast and crew were in one hell of a hurry to reach the finishing line before Covid derailed the production.

I mean why film makeshift open heart surgery in an operating room when you can put everyone in the back of an ambulance in the middle of a high-speed chase sequence?

While Ambulance suffers from complete over-use of technology like drones, it also features real high-speed driving and car smashes filmed throughout the streets of Los Angeles.

Another plus is the trio of main performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, playing criminal step-brothers who hijack an ambulance to get away from a bank heist gone horribly wrong, and Eiza González as the paramedic who gets taken hostage for the ride and is forced to conduct the aforementioned mobile surgery on a dying cop.

My favourite Michael Bay film is still The Rock with the fantastic trio of Nic Cage, Sean Connery and Ed Harris. Ambulance is too chaotic and too long, but it’s still hard to take your eyes off the screen.