AMBULANCE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

Michael Bay is back, and in a change from our usual programming this is suddenly something to be welcomed. Shorn of the rubbish "humour" and grubby sexualised leering at "college girls" and underwear models from the tiresome Transformers movies and their increasing idiocy, and with the action and screeching tyres cranked up beyond all human reason, Ambulance is two parts Michael Mann's Heat, three parts Speed, and seventy-three parts Shouting Like A Maniac - and I loved it. It has no subtlety, it has no nuance, it has no restraint, it has no depth. It's all storm and no calm, all orgasm and no foreplay.

To be strictly fair, it does have an opening bit that sets up the three main characters: military veteran Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) needs fast money for family medical costs, so hooks up with his not entirely unprincipled criminal not-really brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a couldn't-be-simpler bank heist that very morning. But then everything obviously goes spectacularly wrong, bullets fly and Danny has the brainwave of taking over the ambulance sent to get the seriously wounded cop out of the building. They also take the paramedic Cam (Eiza Gonzalez) hostage to look after the patient because if the cop dies they'll likely be facing the electric chair. What else can they do but run for it?

Screaming through traffic on the opposite carriageway, formulating plans on the fly, trying to keep the injured cop for bleeding to death and performing emergency surgery on him via Zoom: Ambulance keeps raising the stakes until it's forced to come to a kind of ending after another endless gunfight with even more trigger-happy gangsters. Who these guys were and what their significance was supposed to be remained unclear: much of the dialogue is bellowed over the din of blaring sirens and cars smashing into one another, so those minor little details will probably have to wait until the subtitles on the Blu-Ray. Meanwhile, just sit back and watch two hours of mayhem and destruction and explosions and shouting, much of it captured with magnificent if slightly vertigo-inducing camera drones. Michael Bay directs all this with his boner as usual and who cares if he's still got no idea about character or coherent narrative? He is primarily a crash bang kaboom action director (Bad Boys, The Rock) and no other filmmaker can shoot a family saloon corkscrewing across the screen in slow-motion in an orgasmic shower of sparks and fire quite like him.

It's based on a Danish thriller of the same name that doesn't seem to have got a release over here (and is an entire hour shorter, because Michael Bay clearly doesn't think a mere eighty minutes is anything like enough). I enjoyed the hell out of Ambulance far more than I was expecting given some of the terrible films he's made (Pain And Gain is a particular offender) and whilst I'm not going to suggest that it's a gem deserving of a whole mantelpiece of awards, it's great slambang fun and dizzyingly put together. I left the cinema exhausted. And the Fast And Furious series now needs to seriously up its game.

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