★★★ (3/5)

You probably know his name; Michael Bay is an L.A. native whose reputation as a filmmaker has loomed over Hollywood for almost three decades. As we’ve learned over the course of his wildly successful career through a body of work that includes Armageddon, Bad Boys, and the Transformers franchise, Bay doesn’t make movies that aspire toward subtlety. Instead, his movies are tailor-made for excitement in excess, with total disregard for physics or logic. It’s not high art—but that’s not to say he lacks artistry.

Finding his start in the mid-90s, a golden age for action movies, Michael Bay co-opted a style that allows him to prioritize adrenaline over depth. So much so that his movies are often stereotyped by their high-octane depictions of destruction: bullets whizzing, cars exploding, and buildings leveled in a mushroom cloud of glass and rubble. His one-dimensional plots can usually be explained in a single sentence and they almost never make sense—but in Bay’s playground, we don’t ask questions. The signature quality he’s cultivated is referred to endearingly as ‘Bayhem’, a style whose influence has bled into the fabric of action movies today.

From F9 to Red Notice, many recent titles take inspiration from Bay’s previous work; after all, he is the fourth highest-grossing director of all time. His latest film Ambulance follows two adoptive brothers with opposing morals, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal, who execute a high-stakes bank heist in Los Angeles. When their getaway plans are foiled, they’re forced to hijack an ambulance with an EMT and an injured cop in tow. Though Ambulance only earned $8.6 million in its opening weekend, many believe it to be a return to form for Bay, Hollywood’s resident merchant of madness.

“There’s a special sauce for explosions. It’s like a recipe. I see some directors do it, and they look cheesy, or it won’t have a shockwave. There are certain ways with explosions where you’re mixing different things, and different types of explosions to make it look more realistic. It’s like making a Caesar salad.”

Michael Bay | Empire

Ambulance is a textbook popcorn movie that functions on two levels: one as a heist film, and two as a car chase movie. As the former, it lacks the procedural insight of crime classics like Heat or The Town. Regardless, we still find the experience worthwhile because of its fundamental lack of self-seriousness. Compared to the rest, Ambulance is Michael Bay’s most self-effacing work, almost to the point of parody. At one point, a character quotes Sean Connery’s ‘prom queen’ line from The Rock which delivers a humorous jolt of self-awareness that differs from his more grounded work like 13 Hours or Pearl Harbor.

When the narrative shifts gears and transitions to a sprawling car chase, Bay’s hallmark tendencies come alive in spectacular fashion; the ambulance roars around Los Angeles for nearly two hours, blazing through red lights and Farmers’ Markets with LAPD in hot pursuit. The movie is indebted to Speed in more ways than one, but especially in terms of its sheer vehicular destruction. As we’ve come to expect in Bayhem, patrol vehicles are playthings—plunged into buildings, blasted by grenade launchers, and engulfed in fireballs, evoking imagery out of Grand Theft Auto.

Despite the primitive excitement we feel while watching a car launched three stories high, Ambulance was made for only $40 million: a mere fifth of the budget for Transformers in 2007. The mark of a skilled director isn’t always what you see on the surface, it’s how they’ve allocated the bankroll they’ve been given. With almost 30 years of directing experience, Bay has proven himself resourceful on the tightest of budgets. In Ambulance, stunts are executed practically with minimal use of computer graphics. Bay also had to adapt to the additional challenge of shooting high-wire action in the midst of a pandemic, which presents a unique set of benefits for shooting a car chase through the empty streets of LA.

When it comes to lead performances, Michael Bay loves working with top-tier talent, even though he doesn’t usually specialize in thoughtful character development. Take Armageddon for example; Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis are oil drillers who are deployed to outer space to destroy a Texas-sized asteroid—in exchange for lifetime tax pardons. If that sounds nonsensical, it’s because his movies usually are.

As an audience, we tend to overlook Bay’s compulsions because there’s a voluntary suspension of logic in movies with such fierce commitment to spectacle. Because of this, we need energetic characters we can latch onto. Ambulance is a wild ride that relies heavily on the strength of its two leads, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal. Their motivations aren’t always clear, but their adversarial dynamic provides a means for Bay to move the story forward and create makeshift tension along the way.

Out of step with his recent trend of losing himself in a series of dark and subdued roles, Jake Gyllenhaal delivers a rockstar performance as Danny Sharp, the charismatic outlaw whose devilish allure and unstable rage push the stakes to extreme heights. Gyllenhaal plays Danny with an unhinged bravado, blasting rifles and screaming lines of dialogue in a performance reminiscent of vintage Nic Cage.

His counterpart in Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stands out as the moral compass of Ambulance. In need of operation money for his ailing wife, Will Sharp resorts to desperate measures against his best judgment. Though led astray by his devious brother, Will is an ex-marine who is guided by principle. And compared to the psychopathic Danny, his role requires more nuance and empathy—redeemable qualities that become clearer as the saga unfolds.

Despite his lack of thematic complexity, Bay’s competence as a blockbuster moviemaker goes unquestioned. He embellishes Ambulance with such relentless pacing that hardly gives room to breathe, thanks to some savvy editing by Pietro Scalia, the two-time Academy Award-winning editor of Black Hawk Down and JFK.

While the movie slightly suffers from its lengthy runtime—as all Michael Bay movies generally do—it doesn’t hamper the sensory spectacle of its action sequences. Ambulance is a movie that works best on the largest screen possible in a packed auditorium so you can gauge the collective reaction. But given its underwhelming box office turnout, there’s an unavoidable quandary as we enter our second year of COVID-19: can a middle-tier non-franchise action movie ever find success again? Or has the Michael Bay formula officially overstayed its welcome with mainstream audiences?

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