March 17, 2022
William Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a war veteran in dire financial needs because of his wife's poor health. His brother by adoption Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) convinced him to join his crew for a multi-million bank heist. The robbery did not go as planned and the situation got even worse when a young policeman Zach (Jackson White) was shot and was bleeding to death, so an ambulance had to be summoned to the scene to attend to the downed officer.
As Danny and William get trapped, they hijack the ambulance as their getaway vehicle, and take the ailing Zach along with the EMT attending to him, Cam Thompson (Eiza Gonzalez) along as a hostages. When the police realized that the thieves had escaped from the bank building, a frantic car chase ensued all over the streets of Los Angeles, with the authorities led by Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) and FBI Agent Anson Clark (Keir O'Donnell).
Director Michael Bay literally exploded into the international movie scene with his hit debut explosive action-comedy film "Bad Boys" (1995). Since then, he has come out with some of noisiest, fieriest, most frenetic films that became his signature, like "The Rock" (1996), "Armageddon" (1998), "Pearl Harbor" (2001), "Transformers" (2007) and its four sequels (2009, 2011, 2014 and 2017), "Pain and Gain" (2013) and "6 Underground" (2019).
Lately, Jake Gyllenhaal had been tackling very high-strung excitable characters, like supervillain Mysterio in "Spider-Man: Far from Home" (2019) and the troubled 911 operator in "The Guilty" (2021). His character Danny Sharp here was really a scary, crazy guy who simply snapped as things did not go his way on this particular day, when his perfectly-laid plans miscarried and was unraveling in the worst possible way.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II turned heads as the charismatic Black Panther head Bobby Seale in "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (2020). His William Sharp is a considerably more vulnerable character -- a man driven to crime by sheer desperation. In her biggest role since her breakthrough in "Baby Driver" (2017), Eiza Gonzalez's fearless EMT Cam is quite attention-getting, especially for her "successful" surgery using her hair clip as a vascular clamp.
This remake of a 2005 Danish film was one big, over-the-top, exaggerated hyperbole, a Bay trademark. To add more chaos, he made sure that the ambulance had fruits or flowers or dresses to hit and scatter around. The camera was in constant dizzying motion, coming in and out from various angles. Running at a hefty 136 minutes, the whole thing felt bloated and can actually be tiresome to watch with all the medical absurdities and manic energy it had. 4/10.
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