Just before the significant chasing and capturing gets underway, the titular motor vehicle and its heroic E.M.T., Cam Thompson (Eiza González), show up at to a younger car or truck-accident target who has been impaled on a piece of wrought-iron fence. This kind of mishap is a staple of exhibits like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “9-1-1,” and “Ambulance” can be seen as a sustained critique of television’s domesticated presentation of disaster. Cam will save the kid in the morning and by the time rush hour rolls all around is accomplishing emergency abdominal surgical treatment in the middle of a vehicle chase even though conferring with trauma surgeons via movie chat. Exploding vehicles and an exploding spleen, lower together in ideal counterpoint: that is cinema, kids.
So are the wild vertical drone photographs in which the camera rockets skyward ahead of plunging back again to earth, a carnival-trip go that Bay provides to his repertoire of swooping, ricocheting, vertiginous results. And so, eventually, is the tale, an aged-fashioned concatenation of coincidences, collisions and foolproof ideas absent horribly awry.
At the heart is a daylight robbery that plucks $32 million from a bank — a modest haul in contrast with the $100 million Ed Harris was after in “The Rock” back again in 1996, especially when you modify for inflation. The most important robbers are Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who grew up as brothers, raised by a felony father. Flashbacks show their boyhood selves at perform, but as developed-ups they have taken diverging paths. Danny adopted in Dad’s footsteps, even though Will joined the Marines. Now married (to Moses Ingram) with an toddler son, he’s desperate for money to pay back for his wife’s cancer treatment. Stopping by Danny’s put of organization to ask for a bank loan, he finishes up signing on with Danny’s crew.
Sooner or later they are joined by two hostages: Cam and a rookie cop named Zach (Jackson White), whose lover, Mark (Cedric Sanders), becomes section of an elaborate tour of the freeways and alleys of Los Angeles that also entails a ton of other people on each sides of the legislation. It all ends up quite substantially the place you hope it will, but the actors do a excellent position of seething and emoting less than force, and Gyllenhaal does a volatile, charming sociopath issue that isn’t as annoying as it might be.
So following significantly deliberation, my essential verdict on “Ambulance” is: It’s a film!
Ambulance
Rated R. F-bombs, exploding cars and trucks, a ruptured spleen. Managing time: 2 hour 16 minutes. In theaters.