I hate Michael Bay movies, but I love Jake Gyllenhaal.
I saw this trailer in the theater before Dune last night. Afterwards, my wife leaned over and commented that she felt like she had already seen the entire movie… or at least all the explosions.
I said, Nah, it’s a Michael Bay film… that was only a tenth of the explosions.
Good cast, now to wait and see if this is Michael Bay doing what he does best, or doing what he does lazily.
God help me, but this looks like it will be really fun.
Ugh, yes. This is an annoyingly good trailer.
I saw this tonight. It was well written all around; I liked the characters and their arcs, the plot was coherent, the dialogue was good. All the actors put in just the right performances. The movie even knew exactly when to not take itself seriously, and leaned into the stupidity at the right times while still somehow managing to keep credibility when the heavier.
Except… This is the most nauseatingly shot movie I have ever seen. I don’t think I’ve seen shaky-cam and hyper-fast cuts being used for two people just standing in a room talking before this. It’s just completely over the top. And then Bay has a new toy for this movie used all over the place: camera drones. Almost all the shots done with them are just gratuitous fluff. There was one action scene where I thought it did give this really interesting and dynamic effect, and I can see the potential, but in general the drone shots were just not long enough.
I remember there was shaky cam work in one of the Bourne movies, maybe the first, maybe the second, with two people just sitting at a table talking, and I was watching and thinking wtf.
I remember thinking that when I tried to watch an episode of a show on NBC in the 90s called “Homicide: Life on the street”. Just two people in a tiny room talking to each other. I was nauseous after 10 seconds and the conversation lasted for 3 minutes.
My inner movie critic does not want to admit it but I had a really good time with this movie. The action was done pretty well, the actors involved really try to do the best with the material they have and some of the drone shots just blew me away.
I do not watch a lot of regular TV anymore, but this is the kind of movie I could have seen myself stumbling across while zapping and just watching to the end everytime it is on.
So wow… this was not my cup of tea, and I usually love Michael Bay - blow up all the things movies.
The story was so so so so so so so dumb, and the movie felt like it was 30 minutes too long.
We just saw this as well. It was stunningly dopey at times with some Olympic level logic gymnastics, but it was still pretty fun in a bad/good kind of way.
I kind of loved how the solution to communicating a characters back story was to just have them say it. The ruse with the green ambulance swap made no sense to me at all. It reminded me of the new Kids in the Hall sketch with the naked robbers.
Also agreed that Bay seems very smitten with drone cameras. They’re everywhere in this.
It was absolutely too long, but I still had fun with this, even if it was more laughing at than anything.
Forgot there was also a literal sketch about an ambulance, haha.
Weakest Bay of those I have seen, not even Eiza could have saved this. I want the times of Rock Bay back :/
Watched this on Peacock. What a pointless piece of crap. This movie has literally no idea what it wants to say and exists as little more than an expensive, creatively bankrupt pastiche of imagery from better films.
Also, I think Bay may have some racially motivated animosity towards street vendors. The gangbangers portrayal? Overtly racist. Just pointlessly cartoon evil to justify their slaughter by the “heroes” in a later scene. The way you might say Michael Mann has made love letters to LA, you could say AmuLAnce is Michael Bay hate-fucking the city.
And I have never seen anything stupider than this movie’s idea of a mobile command center. It’s just, like, a canopy on a pickup truck and you have to crawl in on your hands and knees and then try to twist around to lay sideway? How is that better than a van or bus or RV or box truck or just commandeering a lemonade stand, sweeping all the cups onto the ground and setting down your laptop?
I finally finished watching AmbuLAnce. Overall, Michael Bay’s lack of attention to detail in his action scenes is once again on full display here, but it doesn’t bother me as much in this movie because the moment-to-moment action isn’t actually all that important.
Throughout the movie he uses drone-shots, with a pretty unique aesthetic that is unique to this movie that I doubt we’ve ever seen before or will see again: the idea is that there’s a bunch of drone cameras around LA that are flying around, and they just get to the action a little too late or too early. So for instance, when the bank robbers are in the bank, we switch to a drone camera that’s at the top of the bank building, and it dives down the side of the building and gets to the front of the bank to capture that the bank robbers are not there yet and that we’re still waiting. Later there’s a chase, and we switch to another drone on top of another building, and it swoops down the building, and it gets down to street level, but it’s a little too late as the ambulance and police have already gone by. Darn, missed it!
I kind of loved it, honestly. It’s like they had to use the drones, and Michael Bay famously likes to shoot fast, and he never quite gets the shot and he says, fuck it, let’s move on. Yes! Fuck it, it’s not important. What’s important is that we get the kinect energy of the drone as it flies around, we get the sense of motion in the shaky cam dialog scenes and the zooms into the face, and the movie knows that it’s silly and it rolls with it. So what if we didn’t get the shot? The location of the ambulance during the chases is also not important. There’s a scene where we see the ambulance enter a huge parking lot, and if you’re paying attention and you see the police pour into this parking lot after the ambulance, you’re probably thinking “oh shit, how are they going to leave this giant parking lot? They’re trapped now”. But that’s because you’re again thinking about details that are not important to Michael Bay. The important thing here isn’t the parking lot. It’s the fact that we’re in a chase. The details of who is chasing who and who can get out of parking lots is not important. (We cut to a scene of the Ambulance leaving an unrelated alleyway).
I used to get very frustrated by Michael Bay movies because he’s so bad at filming coherent action scenes sometimes, but this movie kind of played to his strengths I think. The script knows that the details are not important, which is very important in a Michael Bay movie. And so it worked for me.