“We’re not the bad guys, we’re just the guys trying to get home!”
“We don’t get to walk off into the sunset!”
In a Michael Bay movie, the American Dream is dead. It seems like a contradictory thing to say for a director who, over the years, has cultivated a cultural persona so intrinsically tied with military fetishism and United States patriotism. But Bay has never been subtle in his contempt for the country’s rotting institutions, and his work has always been keenly interested in exploring the ways these federal systems fail the very people it’s meant to protect. His early films like Bad Boys and The Rock, despite their focus on characters working in United States law enforcement, showcase how these branches of government aren’t always as righteous as we’re taught to believe. Other films like Pearl Harbor and 13 Hours, even with their foregrounding of state agents and operators, drive home the point how those in charge would rather govern in diplomatic rules and codes at the cost of innocent human lives. And any political commentary that can be gleaned from his Transformers series, Bay’s multi-billion dollar grossing franchise, can be summated by the realization that the series’ ‘evil’ Decepticons primarily disguise themselves in the form of police and military transportation only, while our heroes the Autobots choose to blend in via more typically ‘blue collar’ vehicles such as pickup trucks, six-wheelers and muscle cars.
It’s no surprise then that Ambulance, Bay’s latest film and the best of his career, carries on his long-standing critiques of national establishments and institutions, this time taking aim at a more contemporary issue in a post-COVID era; the healthcare system. Set entirely in the streets of Los Angeles over the course of a single day, Ambulance follows former Afghanistan marine Will Sharpe (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his career-criminal brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). When Will’s veterans insurance fails to pay out, Danny gives his brother the chance to get the money he needs for his wife’s life-saving cancer surgery by taking part in a $32 million bank heist. Will reluctantly agrees out of desperation, but soon things start to go wrong, and the two brothers find themselves on the run from the entire LAPD in the back of an ambulance, inadvertently taking two hostages in the process: headstrong EMT Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) and wounded police officer Zach (Jackson White). What entails for the rest of the film is a brutal, exhilarating chase throughout every square inch of LA, filled to the brim with all the typical Bayisms, as we watch our protagonists try to find a way to survive their ordeal and get home safely.
Bay’s subtlety is still virtually non-existent; our heroes commandeering a literal symbol of the broken American healthcare system and causing mass destruction isn’t exactly the most nuanced of metaphors. But in today’s era of committee-made, highly-sanitized blockbuster franchises, an original action film from one of Hollywood’s premiere voices of the genre is a throwback to a bygone age of studio moviemaking, one that allowed idiosyncratic artists to put their stamp on the some of the year’s most expensive films. Ambulance presents the apex of all of Michael Bay’s sensibilities, his decades-long thematic interests finally congealing with his hyper-maximalist filmmaking style, a perfect marriage of vision and material and a return to form for one of Hollywood’s most undervalued artists.
Few directors of Bay’s stature have been able to establish not only a unique visual style throughout the course of their careers, but more crucially, a sense of voice that can be so clearly attributed to a single person. Cutting his teeth on the sets of commercials and music videos, Bay’s signature mix of slow-motion, lens flare, low angle 360’s, and shaky cam close-ups all lend themselves to the sensory-based kineticism that makes all of his films so easily identifiable. Ambulance is no different. The camera is never static in the film, but rather, constantly in motion to convey the high-octane environment our characters are trapped in. With many scenes taking place in the back of a moving vehicle, Bay’s janky, hand-held camera plunges us directly into this steel box of destruction, the claustrophobic walls of the ambulance encroaching just as much on the viewer as it does on his characters.
The same dizzying effect is translated into scenes of action, grounding us in our protagonists’ psychological headspace and adding a heightened level of energy to every bullet that’s shot, every car that explodes. It’s a technique that’s beautifully juxtaposed with Bay’s use of drone shots, a fairly recent addition to his bag of tricks. Throughout the chase around the city, he sends the camera flying high above the streets of Los Angeles, whirring down the sides of skyscrapers and weaving in between highway overpasses. When Bay contrasts these moments against the tight close-ups within the vehicle, these drone shots serve as an almost cathartic release, the high-strung emotions of our heroes literally begging for release and bursting into the stratosphere.
But the true magic of the film lies within Bay’s ability to yet again to craft one of the year’s most thrilling cinematic experiences while still shining a light on contemporary issues within society. The entirety of Bay’s career is littered with films that cover the same thematic concerns that are explored in Ambulance, but more often than not, he’s trained his attention on the degradation of institutions as a whole, taking his bombastic filmmaking style as a sledgehammer against the walls of America’s building blocks. Bad Boys II, for example, opens with two black cops posing undercover inside a Klu Klux Klan gathering, drawing a direct line not only between the centuries-long entwining of the police force and the KKK, but the ways in which people of color are forced into these systems in order to make a living. Conversely, Transformers: Dark of the Moon ends with American icon Optimus Prime summarily executing both his sworn nemesis Megatron and his corrupted mentor Sentinel Prime, eradicating the sins of the past establishment in order to pave a brighter future.
In Ambulance, Bay finally pulls back the camera to refocus his attention on the ordinary people at the center of America’s failed institutions, condemning the system not just through an expose of its incompetence but by the ways in which they affect the lives of the everyday person. It’s inside the ambulance where most of the film’s core tension takes place, the vehicle serving as a melting pot for a quartet of distinctly individual personalities, each with their own external desires and motivations prior to the events portrayed onscreen. Yet throughout the film’s runtime, they can only afford to exist in relation to each other, the humanistic urge of survival propelling them to put their lives in the hands of the person sitting next to them, regardless of what side of the law they’re on.
That’s not to say the film is stripped of Bay’s usual trademarks, but rather, they’re repurposed to fit this more humanistic approach. Take his penchant for visual gags of gore and guts, typically played for cheap comedic effect in his other movies. In Ambulance, an injured character requires an urgent blood transfusion, so instead, the squirting of extraneous liquids from a human body is used to convey the innate physical bonds between two human beings, a pair of strangers sharing each other’s inner fluids all in the name of survival. The aforementioned use of shaky cam close-ups are also used in a similar way, the confines of the vehicle forcing Bay’s camera to train its eye on the minute interactions between our four characters, the meeting of eyes, the touching of hands, the human experience in a microcosm.
The film’s most powerful images however, occur in the repetition of sparsely placed moments throughout its story, a flashback to Will and Danny in their childhood playing a game of cops and robbers in their yard as kids. What seems like an innocent memory for the brothers, soon turns into one tinged with regret given their current situation. Will and Danny never stood a chance, the system resigning them, and millions of other people, to their roles in society the moment they came of age. On the run from the cops, fighting for their lives just to get home, it’s like they were doomed to do this from the start. The American Dream is dead indeed.
