My love/mostly hate war with Michael Bay continues… though at least we have settled on a little cease fire. I didn’t hate Ambulance… though Mr. Bay made concerted efforts to make me do so. Just not a fan of his artistic eye for action spectacle… it largely looks like a guy set up a camera and started shaking it and said, “ART!”

Ambulance is about a bank robbery that goes wrong. Two of the robbers hijack an ambulance and make a run for it. They have a shot cop and an EMT working on him in the back so they are given leeway to run by the army of LAPD following them. This goes on four 2 1/2 hours. Is there story for 2 1/2 hours? No, but there’s plenty of cameras to be shaken.

Bay makes big noisy action flicks but I don’t think he’s ever made as pure an action flick as this. It’s almost pure chase and shootouts for the full runtime and that’s actually not a complaint. It reminded me of the (FAR SUPERIOR) Mad Max: Fury Road.

And, to be fair, Bay does a few interesting things within all this action that gives the movie some minor reprieve. He gives us a strong female lead (Eliza Gonzalez) and never once points the camera at her ass. He gives us a decent brother relationship between Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen. They form a nice adversarial triangle with the Gonzalez which adds layers to the characters and circumstances. He gives us character growth, if minimal in context, but maximal in hero shots. These character beats are enough… just enough… to make the movie more watchable than usual.

But, yeah, then there’s the usual bayhem. I just don’t like it. I need more than just random two seconds shots of chaos with a camera strapped to a washing machine and pushed out of a plane over LAX. This isn’t exciting, it doesn’t build connective tissues from moment to moment. It’s just jittery spectacle. I can’t argue it isn’t filmed with his usual style so if you like his routine, you’ll like this movie. And you can ignore the fool writing this who apparently has a stick up his butt.

Bay did decide to add a new camera to his repertoire: an aerial drone that occasionally and randomly (and occasionally and very randomly) shows up to give us a very smooth flyby of the action. It’s pretty but doesn’t really work for two reasons. One, it aggressively stands out from his usual shaky cam shots. And two, the shots are too short… and back to the madhouse.

But, hey, perhaps because it’s 2 1/2 hours of chaos intermixed with some decent characters, but I wound up eventually getting on board enough to mostly enjoy the flick. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome at work… maybe he just ground my cynicism and will to dust. The movie’s alright… there’s a hell of a lot of it… and it’s alright.

Score: 77