Ambulance Proves the New Bay Is Just Better Old Bay
The more we change, the more Michael Bay stays the same. If, almost 20 years ago in Bad Boys II, stealing a car from Dan Marino naturally leads to our mass-murderous buddy cops, Marcus (Martin Lawrence) and Mike (Will Smith), swerving between naked corpses tumbling from the back of the bad guys’ truck—Marcus desperately whining, “This is unnecessary!”—then logically there is nowhere else to go, the indulgence of a legendarily indulgent director manifesting entirely. Perfectly. In the subsequent years he’s directed five Transformers movies, 13 Hours (regrettably encouraging John Krasinski), The Island, 2019’s Netflix fodder 6 Underground and Pain & Gain, arguably his second film to somehow epitomize his style. If Ambulance, his 15th feature currently basking in a gleeful critical reappraisal of Bay’s canon, feels as entelechial as Bad Boys II, it can only be because Bay has found himself in the absolute best time to be Bay.
Though an ensemble of Angelenos fills out the film as it barrels to pretty much the only conclusion it could have, Ambulance is about as tidy as a Michael Bay film can get. Bereft of complicated plot and mostly self-contained, the movie succeeds in feeling retroactively fresh; any online chatter about an ACU (Ambulance Cinematic Universe) spoils just how invigorating it can be in 2022 to get an action thriller from an old hand blockbuster director that reads as untouched by—downright disconnected from—any hyperliberal marketing machine. This is nostalgia, but for a subgenre of kinetic filmmaking Bay defined himself more than two decades ago. We miss the old Bay, but he’s the new Bay, which we’ve only recently realized is just a better old Bay. He, in turn, does not seem to pay attention to what we realize. Or what we don’t.
Within ten minutes we’re deep in Ambulance: Strapped for money to pay his wife’s escalating medical bills, let alone care for their infant son, Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) agrees to join his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal, always a joy to behold) on one last big score, a bank heist that goes inevitably wrong. Subsequently, they shoot a cop (Jackson White) and commandeer the cop’s ambulance, also occupied by the “best” EMT in L.A., Cam Thompson (Eiza González)—just one more embittered soul in the grand gray tapestry that is the City of Angels. As Danny loses control and Will more and more accepts his fate as the offspring of a fabled bank-robbing psychopath, their bank robber father spoken of in hushed tones and unbelievable stories, the entire militarized might of the LAPD descends upon the stolen ambulance, led by Captain Monroe (Garret Dillahunt), a man who festishizes the police enough that Bay doesn’t have to. Even when FBI Agent Clark (Keir O’Donnell) gets involved, he’s only invited into Monroe’s inner circle because he went to college with Danny.
Bad Boys and the fever dream of Bad Boys II are about how Michael Bay thinks that cops must be psychopaths in order to confront a modern psychopathic world. In Ambulance, as much as his vision of the LAPD comprises sophisticated surveillance and world-killing artillery to rival the most elite military power of the U.S. government—making sure it all looks really fucking cool—he also makes sure to interrupt an especially destructive chase sequence (as he once had Martin Lawrence declare the events happening on screen obligatory and nothing else) among so many especially destructive chase sequences, to have Monroe’s left hand, Lieutenant Dhazghig (Olivia Stambouliah), tell him how many tax dollars they’re annihilating. Later, many, many police officers die in explosions and hails of gunfire, bodies indiscriminately everywhere. One detects glee in these scenes, as if Bay’s countering Monroe’s dismissal of so many flagrantly abused tax dollars by blowing up half the LAPD in a spectacle that practically demands applause. Maybe Michael Bay no longer sees the utility in unleashing psychopathic cops on a psychopathic world, but maybe he never did.