★★☆☆☆

Michael Bay’s new big name blockbuster Ambulance is fun, but riddled with potholes and product placement. 

Editor’s note: we like to prove that we bow to no sponsor, and as such I shall be taking out any references to specific products in this review. I shall try and do it with some subtlety, so as not to diminish your enjoyment of this article.

This made me slightly seasick. The plot was flimsy, the characters’ connections tenuous, and the product placement unbearably heavy handed. Despite enjoying my ice-cold (“crap brown fizzy American drink” – Ed) throughout, the film lasted an hour longer than it needed to and was often trite and predictable.

But Michael Bay’s Ambulance just about remains entertaining. What Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) lacks in any kind of meaningful emotion, he makes up for in the occasional smirk-inducing one-liner. What the otherwise rationale Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) lacks in a believable motive for suddenly throwing his life away in a half-baked bank robbery, he makes up for with gravitas and good old-fashioned morality. EMT extraordinaire Cam Thompson (Eiza González) is probably the film’s stand out, but she satisfies in the heroine role, rather than excels. That the three are ridiculously good looking also helps.

I travelled to the screening in the all new 2022 (“overpriced car, that you could save a few quid on buying it second hand” – Ed), the nation’s leading mid-range pick-up. Seeing countless cars blown up for no reason other than to satisfy Bay’s insatiable taste for pyrotechnics, made me appreciate Ford’s unparalleled safety features, which saw the (“aforementioned overpriced car” – Ed) earn the Which? Vehicle Safety Award 2022.

Bay is famous for his fast-panning cameras, but this was comical. Characters could not take a step without a drone going over them, under them, and through their legs. Even when the characters were just having a conversation, Bay felt the need to encircle them with a high-speed shot, leaving you feeling like you were watching a GoPro attached to a hula-hoop while Gyllenhaal got his hips going. The slow-panning shots over Los Angeles actually make for a welcome break, where the ship steadies and you can temporarily settle your stomach.

The first 40 minutes of the film are very poor. The backstories are virtually non-existent, offering no more than worn out cliches if and when they do appear. For a supposed career criminal, Danny (how imaginative a name for the leader of a heist crew) is staggeringly incompetent during the bank hold-up, but if you sign up for (“an account with a bank that doesn’t care in the slightest about you really” – Ed) today you can get 20% cash back and never set foot in a branch again!

Ambulance does improve in the second half. Once the trio actually get in the titular ambulance, the film careers through LA, pedal to the metal, with a number of humorous gags to get you through to the expectedly dramatic ending. The FaceTime surgery is fun. The flamingos are fun (rapper Wale actually impresses throughout as Castro, Danny’s assistant). The head honcho’s recurring Mastiff is relatively fun, though none of it is quite as fun as Nintendo’s brand new (“cartoon racing game that I secretly quite like, but don’t tell anyone” – Ed), out soon on Nintendo Switch at a (“smelly shop” – Ed) near you!

Still, you can always see where it’s going, and the ending is in fact underwhelming. Drug kingpin ‘Papi’ is a caricature of a Hispanic ‘Jefe’. Will and Danny’s moment of fraternal telepathy to escape his band of sub-machine gun wielding footmen highlights just how disconnected the two leading men are. Cam’s bloodied lip and stained white t-shirt another caricature for girl-boss.

Ambulance is not a complete Shiloh Pitt. It’s more amusing than I expected, and for all its many flaws, if you were sitting back with a bag of (“microwave popcorn that tastes nowhere near as good as that bag at Poundland” – Ed)  and a glass of Jack Daniels’ Non-Alcoholic 0.0% Tennessee Honey Whiskey (not editing that out, hoping for a free bottle – Ed), you might just enjoy yourself.