Michael Bay defibrillates old-school action cinema with Ambulance

polygon.com:

“People still rob banks?” someone asks about halfway through Michael Bay’s heist-gone-wrong/car-chase thriller Ambulance. She might as well have asked, “People still make movies about people robbing banks?” Or, more to the point, “People still make movies like this about people robbing banks?” It’s a rare self-aware moment in an otherwise very un-self-conscious throwback: an action movie that could be straight out of the mid-’90s, but that most definitely is not being clever about it.

Ambulance belongs to a specific breed of action film that has been chased out of theaters over the last couple of decades by the fantastical, digital franchise blockbuster. It’s a one-shot idea that sets off a practical spectacle of car crashes, gun battles, stunts, and sweaty acting, orchestrated by a deranged ringmaster of a director who will stop at nothing to get the shot he has in mind. It’s stupid, exciting, unruly (with a 136-minute run time), and strangely refreshing.

The really strange thing is that this shock to the system for old-school action filmmaking comes from Bay, who has been a bête noir for film critics and cinephiles for the best part of two decades. This is the director whose taste for frenetic cutting and camerawork turned action movies into barely legible visual assaults. This is the director whose five increasingly dire Transformers films represent the nadir of the Hollywood intellectual property strip-mine. This is the director who, until now, had only managed a single “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, for his 1996 prison caper The Rock. Funny kind of savior.

Ambulance doesn’t register as an actual departure for Bay, although it is modest by his standards, with a $40 million budget and a down-to-earth setting on