Ambulance Review

gamerant.com:

The Transformers movies have earned Michael Bay a reputation as a filmmaker who favors explosions over emotions, providing mindless spectacle without making a real connection to the audience. Bay operates best in the realm of Michael Mann and Tony Scott, capturing the intensity of real-world violence, not the grandiose blockbuster carnage of Cybertronian-on-Cybertronian violence. Bay’s greatest films – Bad Boys, The Rock, 13 Hours – are straightforward action movies focused on people facing insurmountable odds as opposed to rock-‘em-sock-‘em sci-fi set-pieces.

With his latest movie, Ambulance, Bay has once again proven that he does his best work on this kind of grounded mid-budget action thriller. Best described as a Bayhem take on Dog Day Afternoon, Ambulance is sharper, smarter, and more character-driven than the average Bay-helmed blockbuster. In the Mann/Scott tradition, Ambulance is a no-nonsense, old-school thriller that wastes no time with exposition and jumps into the action as soon as the audience knows enough about the protagonists to care what happens to them.

Watch The Action-Packed Trailer For Michael Bay's Ambulance

The early scenes cross-cut between a few day-in-the-life sequences introducing all the key players and their interpersonal conflicts – two bank-robbing brothers with opposing ethics, a sympathetic EMT, and a cop – before the inciting incident pulls them all together. The bank robbery is foiled, the cop gets shot, and the brothers take both the paramedic and the bleeding cop hostage in a stolen ambulance. The heist kicks off the action nice and early, and once Bay goes from exposition mode to action mode, he maintains that level of intensity until the end credits.

Bay’s style is defined by every shot