Ambulance, review: Michael Bay, master of action and crass chauvinism, is back – hurrah!

There is something charmingly utilitarian about the new Michael Bay film being titled Ambulance: imagine if Sidney Lumet had called Dog Day Afternoon “Bank”, or Speed had been released as “Bus”.

Said emergency-services vehicle is where the majority of this glistening pursuit thriller takes place – it’s hijacked by two bank-robbing brothers, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) Sharp, during their escape from a vault in downtown Los Angeles while clutching the biggest score of their lives. Danny’s father was a notorious crook in his day, and his son has evidently followed in his footsteps. Will, who was adopted, has grown into an upstanding citizen and served in the US military, but he’s now in financial strife due to his wife’s mounting medical bills, so has reluctantly gone to his wayward sibling for help.

Their getaway is hampered by two unexpected passengers. One is Cam Thompson (Eiza González), a hard-bitten paramedic, and the other is Officer Zach (Jackson White), who sustains a bullet wound during the heist and whose life Cam is trying to save. (When we’re introduced to Zach, we know that he’s a trustworthy sort because he and his partner are enthusiastically discussing The Rock, the popular 1996 film directed by Michael Bay.) The pair’s presence means the cops can’t simply shoot out the vehicle’s tyres. Instead, it has to be chased down and cornered.

As plots go, this is a Grand Theft Auto mission with airs – a gossamer pretext for two hours of windscreen-shattering carnage. But while bullets whizz and punches are thrown, Cam’s medical skills also play an instrumental role in the action. There is a striking sequence in which, while consulting with a surgeon via Zoom, she manages to repair a punctured spleen with a hair clasp.

Loosely adapted by Chris Fedak from a 2005 Danish thriller, Ambulance was shot in Los Angeles in early 2021 while local lockdown regulations were still in force. That context, alongside González’s no-nonsense heroine, essentially make the film Bay’s heartfelt tribute to frontline medical workers: the Bad Boys and Transformers director’s version of standing on the doorstep on a Thursday evening and hitting a frying pan with a whisk. In fact, much of the film is essentially just that, but with traffic. Speeding vehicles are clunked and donked into one another with xylophonic zeal, while the camera snakes and tears between them faster than seems physically possible. I mean it as a compliment when I say there are entire sequences here which look as if they might have been shot by a monkey in a jetpack.

For a certain type of critic and cinephile, Bay has long been held up as the grand vizier of all crassness and chauvinism in modern-day Hollywood, and Ambulance is unlikely to convince them otherwise. But even a single frame of it contains more visual flair than the entirety of, say, the latest Spider-Man: whether Bay’s subject is one of his actors’ bodies or a squad car’s gleaming flank, his eye for the geometry of phwoar remains unmatched. As ever, the frenzied editing adds less in excitement than it subtracts in sense, and the running time is excessive, though a climactic series of stand-offs and shoot-outs brings matters to a tense and rousing close.

Gyllenhaal, Abdul-Mateen and González all understand the assignment. Their characters could hardly be described as complex, but all three are a pleasure to spend time with. There is joy – perhaps these days more than ever – in seeing action cinema shorn of any franchise complications and simply chasing excitement with every sinew. After endless mugs of freeze-dried decaf, Ambulance is the real-deal triple espresso.

15 cert, 136 mins. Dir: Michael Bay. In cinemas from Friday