Jake Gyllenhaal's Fury Road: a review of Michael Bay's action thriller "Ambulance"
Michael Bay's high-octane nonstop action movie is a frantic symbiosis of "The Clash" and "Speed."
On an early Los Angeles morning, retired soldier Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Matin II) sets out to rob a bank with his brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal). Will needs the money to help his seriously ill wife pay for her surgery, and Danny, a master thief and madman, has long craved a criminal adventure and coaxes his brother to overstep the law. The accomplices' plan is rapidly heading for a fiasco: instead of successfully evading prosecution, Will and Danny acquire a hostage - an injured police officer (Jackson White) who is loaded into a stolen ambulance along with a paramedic (Eisa Gonzalez). The heroes are outside the law, trying to break away from the police and SWAT teams by manipulating the wounded officer of the law and the paramedic.
Michael Bay, the pyromaniac of cinema and the demiurge of the multimillion-dollar Transformers saga, has not lost his spark, pumping the audience with more and more blockbusters about Autobots. On the contrary, the director has become even more inventive in lighting the fuse of entertainment cinema, turning action films into Eisenstein's montage of attractions. If, of course, we take the term with some assumption and vulgarity. Finished with the giant robots, Bay hasn't abandoned a calibrated explosive formula: the epileptic camera, the clanking metal, the machine gun bursts - both in scenes and montage staples - continue to feed his high-octane action, elevating dynamics to the protomatter of cinematography. "ER" is a nonstop movie that brings Bay back to the charms of brutal '90s action movies, and the streets of Los Angeles are once again transformed into a firing range or hotspot. The atmosphere of "The Rock" and "Bad Boys"-perhaps Bay's major directorial highpoints-is mixed here with the plot of Michael Mann's "The Clash" and Jan de Bont's "Speed." From the three-hour robber epic here, of course, is the bank raid itself, but only in convulsive directorial optics: with every-second editing splices, frantic camera pirouettes (it can fly from the building roof to the bank entrance in a couple of moments with drones) and unbridled rhythm, which is fueled by a whacked-out acting performance. Especially Jake Gyllenhaal, who's tried on the image of a thug on the verge of a breakdown: frantic, about to lose his temper and put a bullet in the forehead of a paramedic. The "Speed" inherited the non-stop freeway driving, provoking the characters to new challenges: to operate a policeman at 100 km per hour, to patch a ruptured spleen and to use his fist as an anesthesia. Bay's sophisticated sense of humor and comic mastery of the situation (which was the basis of Blood and Sweat, a two-hour action film about misfit jocks) are, fortunately, embodied here as well.
A manic passion for energy, for a fast and tense pace is the very purpose of Bay's cinematography, in which the plot is only an opening moment and the characters are functional mechanisms. So it's not at all surprising that the characters in "ER" are written in a remarkably shoddy way: you can't sympathize with both the veteran brother who got involved in the adventure for the sake of his family and the criminal Danny. Bay writes the character of Aisa Gonzalez with far more grace, but she, too, is only a hostage to both the plot and the criminal situation. No wonder, since Bay's poetics are not in images, but in the collision of propulsive forces, in the brutal car and gun dynamics. The characters here are extremely weakly motivated, and the sad outcome of the robbery is not difficult to predict - the characters compulsively drive only forward, in accordance with the inner drive of the film, because the universe of "ER" is a mix of testosterone and fuel, the transformation of energy into the driving force of the cinema.
Bay is undoubtedly guided by a very old-fashioned understanding of the power and beauty of cinema: the powder kegs piled up at every plot twist, the glossy texture of the frame, the destroyed machinery and the sunset and dawn scenes. This old-school retrograde attitude carries over to the plot as well - a seemingly half-forgotten attribute in the genre. "Who's robbing banks these days anyway?" - gives out one of the characters, as if to give an ironic meta-commentary on the culture of action movies and at the same time on the world of modern crime, in which the impunity of clearing the vault is unrealizable and impossible. And it's not even a daredevil who would do such a thing, but simply a desperate man who has nothing to lose. But not in Bay's directorial projection, where the grotesque reality still retains the dementia and courage, pathos and adrenaline power of thirty years ago (Roland Emmerich, who recently directed the even more absurd The Falling Moon, lives with a similar flair).
Bay draws on the most powerful arsenal akin to a military deployment to maintain his cinematic machine: drones flying and maneuvering through the streets, 360-degree turns, the uninterrupted use of a hand-held camera in a neat one-day dashing plot, an acid color scheme - in this editing and technological arena Bay is no stranger to outrageous antics. Helicopters calmly chase ambulances over the Los Angeles canals, police cars flip spectacularly, and characters scream and cry, giving the climax a lyrical outline (albeit for pro forma purposes, as is always the case with Bay). The light-heartedness and absurdity are muffled by the director's moderate humor, which makes it clear that "Ambulance" and everyone behind the project are well aware of the absurdity of the chaos reigning on the screen.
But "Ambulance" is first and foremost a real vulgar pleasure. It's the roller coaster that our receptors miss. The handwriting of Hollywood's chief technician doesn't get old, but rather pulls us out of sensory anabiosis, offering a dashing ride overpasses and once again reminding us that cinematography is the result of a merry kaleidoscope of shots. In such a case, Bay's assertiveness is more appropriate than ever, taking a swing at a film that meticulously replicates the gaming aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto. All you have to do is smash a dozen cars and let the drones fly free.
This article was sponsored by Rita Vilner
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