Ambulance Review: Michael Bay Goes Full Bayhem With A Feature-Length Chase And A Wild Jake Gyllenhaal Performance | SlashFilm Reviews

"Ambulance" is a Michael Bay movie. For some folks, that's the only sentence of this review that matters. By now, Bay's ultra-shiny, ultra-chaotic style is so firmly established that you know what you're going to get — and you're likely either on board with that by now, or you think Bay is everything wrong with modern cinema. Me? I'm somewhere in the middle. I think Bay has made some true stinkers. I also think he's a genuine auteur, and when he gets it right (see: "The Rock," "Pain & Gain"), he can deliver a film that's wholly unique, warts and all. Bay, for his part, has no qualms about who he is or what he does (and why should he? Critics aside, his films usually make major bank). He is a filmmaker who knows what he likes, just as fetishistic about his cinematic obsessions as someone like Quentin Tarantino. "This is what I like," Bay shouts through a megaphone at his audience. "You can like it too, or you can buzz off." 

With "Ambulance," Bay continues to celebrate all-things-Bay, going full-Bayhem with a feature-length chase where certain characters will pause to quote lines from the Michael Bay movie "The Rock" or reference the Michael Bay movie "Bad Boys." That's right: Michael Bay exists within the world of this Michael Bay movie. And he's making more Michael Bay movies in that world. It's ridiculously meta. It's a snake swallowing its own tail. It's kind of great. 

Bay ups the ante here by bringing in drone cameras — and the director doesn't use drones like modern-day documentary filmmakers to simply get aerial establishing shots, oh no. He has his drones swoop, and swirl, and twirl, and flip. They buzz through open windows or abandoned buildings like flying insects; they dive-bomb the scenery like birds of prey. It's like Bay got a neat new toy and he just can't stop playing with it. Again, the unbridled Bayness of it all will either click with you or send you heading for the exit. Perhaps it speaks to the sorry state of modern movies, or maybe I'm just starved for some sort of entertaining distraction, but as I sat watching "Ambulance" in a Dolby theater, and felt my comfy seat vibrate with every explosion and burst of gunfire, I couldn't help but get swept up in it all. "Ambulance" does exactly what it sets out to do. Take it or leave it. 

Before the big, feature-length chase begins, "Ambulance" introduces us to its cast of characters. There's ex-soldier Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a stand-up guy trying to get insurance money to come through to pay for experimental surgery for his sick wife (Moses Ingram). Then there's Will's brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who seems to have his fingers in various illegal pies all over Los Angeles. We learn that Danny's family took the orphaned Will in as a boy, and while a close bond formed between the adoptive brothers, they didn't exactly have an idyllic childhood. It's revealed that Danny and Will's father was a psychopathic bank robber, and he tried to pass his criminal trade on to his sons. Danny took to the idea — he's robbed 38 banks in the last year, we're told! — but Will did not. Desperate for money now, Will turns to Danny for help, expecting a loan. Danny makes a counter-offer: Will should come help rob a bank of $32 million. Ideally, Will would walk away from this. But then we wouldn't have a movie. So he goes along, swept up by his brother's manic enthusiasm. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Los Angeles, we meet Cam Thompson (Eiza González), an EMT who is described — and I'm not making this up — as "the best paramedic in town." Soon, these characters will collide.  

Gyllenhaal Steals The Show

González is appropriately fiery and tough as Cam, and Abdul-Mateen II is stoic and sympathetic as Will. We like these characters, especially Will — it would be easy to judge him, since he's ultimately a criminal who puts lives in danger. But Abdul-Mateen II carries himself with such dignity and poise that we accept his actions without question. But make no mistake: "Ambulance" belongs to Gyllenhaal. The actor has entered an interesting phase in his career. After trying on the traditional leading man costume and finding it didn't fit well, Gyllenhaal has embraced weirder and wilder roles. 

Here, it seems like Bay gave him free rein to go nuts, and that's exactly what Gyllenhaal does, spitting his lines out in a motor-mouth fashion that seems to suggest he's improvising the dialogue as he goes rather than reading from a script. He's frantic and sweaty, eyes wide, cracking jokes that don't really make sense. When his sweater gets sprayed by a fire extinguisher he angrily yells, "It's cashmere!" He behaves at all times as if he's just snorted the entire mountain of cocaine that sat on Al Pacino's desk at the end of "Scarface." If Bay's Tilt-A-Whirl filming style didn't thrill us, Gyllenhaal's performance would pick up the slack. In fact, the performance might be too successful, because it slowly becomes clear that we're supposed to think of Danny as a bad guy — and make no mistake, he does bad things — but gosh, it's just so much fun to watch Gyllenhaal have fun. 

As you might have guessed, the bank robbery goes horribly wrong. The rest of the crew is killed, and Danny and Will end up hijacking an ambulance to get away. And wouldn't you know it, Cam is in this ambulance! And so is a rookie cop (Jackson White) who has been shot by Will during the robbery. Now, in true "Speed" fashion, the ambulance rockets along through Los Angeles, refusing to stop, and the cops are in hot pursuit. Leading the charge is an aw-shucks lawman, played by a memorable Garret Dillahunt. He's the type of character willing to halt a chase in order to protect his beloved dog, who happens to be in the back seat of one of the pursuing cop cars. 

More and more characters keep showing up to complicate things, and almost none of them is fleshed out very well. The script, by Chris Fedak, is often quite clunky, and there are countless instances where automated dialog replacement, or looping, has been added so characters (always off-screen) can helpfully summarize what the hell is happening. Is someone's motivation not making sense? No matter! An ADR line will fix that up in a jiffy! And for all Bay's action prowess, he does have a tendency to get too close, rendering several moments visually indecipherable.

And yet ... "Ambulance" still works, because for all its flaws, it never lets up. It never really gives us a moment to stop and think about those flaws as we watch. That will come later, after we've left the confines of the theater. But as we watch, we're lost in the moment. Whenever a movie shows me something that seems new, I perk up. And "Ambulance" has that, in more than one regard. Not just with the way Bay uses drones, but also with the staging of several scenes themselves. The most notable is a bloody, darkly funny moment where Cam and Will have to perform life-saving surgery on the cop, literally cutting open and reaching into his stomach to pull out his spleen — which bursts in a fountain of blood! Since Cam isn't a surgeon, she calls her ex-boyfriend, a doctor. He, in turn, calls two surgeons out golfing. And soon, three doctors are video calling into the ambulance to watch the high-speed surgery unfold and offer comical guidance. I'm not saying "Ambulance" is original — hell, it's a remake of a Danish film from 2005. But I have never seen a sequence like this before, and to watch it here felt fresh and new. And that's a feeling I'm always chasing. So thank you, Michael Bay. I mean that. "Ambulance" is unlikely to convert those who loathe Michael Bay and all he creates. But if you're on board, you're in for one hell of a ride.

/Film Rating: 7 out of 10

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The post Ambulance Review: Michael Bay Goes Full Bayhem With a Feature-Length Chase and a Wild Jake Gyllenhaal Performance appeared first on /Film.

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Steven And Marc Butt Heads (Literally) In Moon Knight Episode 2 | SlashFilm Reviews

You can't help but feel bad for Steven — he's lost his job and his sense of his place in the world. To make matters worse, the personality he shares brain space with is, in his opinion, kind of a jerk who kills wantonly for the Egyptian god of the moon. That's a lot to get used to, but it turns out Steven has more inner strength and resolve than Marc or anyone else expected. (Can you tell I'm Team Steven?)

Read on to get the breakdown of how Steven (Oscar Isaac) and Marc (Oscar Isaac) get into more than one argument about what they're both doing with their lives while Khonshu heckles from afar.

Warning, spoilers for the second episode of "Moon Knight" lie ahead.

It's Area 51 And MI6 Bonkers, Man

After the dramatic ending of the show's first episode (Moon Knight fighting a jackal! Bathroom sinks flying in the air!) we start this one with Steven once again waking up in bed. This time, however, Steven can't pretend that what happened last night in the museum was just a dream. After trying to find the other man in the mirror and failing, Steven heads to work, eager to see the security footage of supernaturally strong jackals chasing him through the exhibits. 

What shows up on those vids, however, is just Steven — the jackals don't show up on camera, and it looks like he is the one causing all the destruction himself. This gets him promptly sacked, which gives Steven plenty of time to dig into what the hell is going on when he's "asleep." He uses the storage key as a start and eventually finds Marc's mercenary man cave. It's there Steven finds the MacGuffin scarab that Harrow needs to find Ammit's tomb, and it's there where Steven and Marc have their first real conversation.

There are a lot of ways to portray someone with multiple personalities talking to themselves, and most of them are bad. "Moon Knight," however, threads the needle well of having Marc and Steven talk with each other via reflections without it becoming hokey. This conversation also lets Steven (and the audience) in on what is really going on — Marc is the avatar of Khonshu, the bird-skulled, scythe-wielding monster Steven has been seeing. This conversation also makes clear that Marc sees himself as a steward of sorts for Steven — he was trying to take care of him, in his own way, by keeping him out of all this.

Steven doesn't take the news well, and who can blame him? He vows to take the scarab and says he's going to get himself locked up, so his body doesn't hurt anyone. Khonshu isn't happy about that and starts chasing Steven in the storage building hallway — Steven appropriately freaks out, runs outside, and tumbles to the ground right in front of his wife.

Every Marriage Has Its Difficulties

Well, Marc's wife, actually. It's Layla from the phone, and she's confused, hurt, and angry at Marc. Steven doesn't know any of this, of course, but they both go back to his flat, where Marc-in-reflection is none to happy to see Layla there. We find out that before Marc disappeared from Layla's life all those months ago, he wanted a divorce. We also find out that Marc wants to keep the scarab hidden from her, and Steven ultimately tries to hide it from her when reflection-Marc tells him that if she becomes involved, she'll be killed.

Layla is too smart for that. She finds the scarab and realizes that Steven isn't just Marc putting up an act. Two "police officers" knock on the door interrupting their conversation, however, and Layla escapes unseen with the scarab while Marc gets hauled off.

Those so-called police officers actually serve Ammit and, by extension, Harrow. They take Steven to Harrow's headquarters, a place full of hardcore followers who tend goats, grow tomatoes, and watch weird television shows with dolphins and flamingos doing stuff in slow-motion. Harrow is all cool as a cucumber with Steven — he offers him lentil soup and tells him that he used to be Khonshu's avatar.

Who broke up with who is unclear, but Harrow is now all about Ammit, who judges people before they've sinned. Steven, in a very Steven-like way, points out the logic of that isn't so great, as it basically allows for child murder and all that. But Harrow doesn't care about Steven's qualms — he just wants the scarab.

Steven doesn't have it of course, and he's not going to give up Layla. But then Layla shows up with the scarab, confronting Harrow head-on.

Meet Mr. Knight

Steven is, to put it mildly, a bit startled by all of this. Layla keeps telling him to "summon the suit" and he is a bit clueless about how to do so. The two run away from Harrow's minions, with Layla beating up more than a few of them on her own. Harrow has jackals up his sleeve, however, and uses the cane to summon them.

Steven and Layla end up in a room full of Egyptian artifacts that Steven cleverly calls, "an evil magician's man cave." Layla keeps begging Marc to come out, and in a touching scene, she finally reaches out to Steven directly. Layla realizes now how separate the two are. It's an emotional moment for Steven, but he still doesn't know how to summon the suit.

A jackal breaks in, and we find out that only Steven can see it, most likely because he is the avatar of Khonshu. The jackal pushes him out of the building and as he falls, he summons the suit and lands in a superhero pose before toppling over. His suit, however, is an actual three-piece suit rather than the traditional garb of Marc's suit. Marc-in-reflection is unimpressed, but we then get a delightful scene of "Steven with a V" trying to fight the jackal himself. It doesn't go great, and Steven ultimately gives up the body to Marc, who then takes the jackal on a chase and impales it on a steeple.

The jackal is gone, but Harrow now has the scarab, as it fell out of Steven/Marc's pocket at some point. It's here where Steven-in-reflection and Marc have another serious conversation, and this one really doesn't go too well. Steven is understandably pissed off — his whole life has been wrecked by Marc and Khonshu, and he doesn't want his body hurting anyone else. Marc says that he must follow Khonshu because of a deal he made with the Egyptian god, and breaks the mirror when Steven doesn't buy it.

We then end the episode with Khonshu and Marc having a little conversation of their own. Khonshu is a complete jerk! He's moody and belittling and so, so bitter. Marc tells him they'll get to Ammit's tomb another way, and Khonshu wearily says they have to go. When Marc asks where, Khonshu replies, "Where the hell do you think?" F. Murray Abraham's delivery here conveys so much — Khonshu is a tired, irascible, desperate god. And where he and Marc (and Steven) go is to Egypt, with the last scene of the episode revealing a drunk Marc in a hotel in his underwear, looking out the window at the pyramids.

Other Thoughts

• Marc, Steven, and Khonshu are giving off some Odd Throuple vibes here, though their relationships are anything but endearing. 
• The Egyptian hotel room where Marc is staying has a smashed mirror. Looks like he and Steven still aren't getting along.
• One of the "police officers" who serves Ammit calls her partner "Billy," a nice reference to the orderlies in the Lemire comics.

New episodes of "Moon Knight" drop Wednesdays on Disney+.

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The post Steven and Marc Butt Heads (Literally) in Moon Knight Episode 2 appeared first on /Film.

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