136 min | R | April 8, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A paramedic and a wounded cop. A bank robbery gone wrong. Two desperate brothers hijack an ambulance and drag the LAPD across Los Angeles at ninety miles an hour. The chase never stops, and neither does Michael Bay.
Will Sharp needs money for his wife’s surgery. He asks his adoptive brother Danny for help. Danny offers him a spot on a bank heist that goes wrong in minutes. The brothers commandurer an ambulance carrying a dying cop and a paramedic, and the rest of the film is one extended pursuit through Los Angeles. The premise is a closed system. Four people in a moving box with the entire city chasing them, and the film never lets the box stop.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Danny Sharp as a man who solves every problem by talking faster and louder. He treats the heist like a sales pitch and treats the hostages like an audience he can still win over. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Will with a tired decency that the chaos slowly burns away. He spends the film trying to keep one promise while breaking every other one. Eiza González plays Cam Thompson, the paramedic who keeps the wounded officer alive while a gun sits near her head, and she gives the film its only character who acts on competence instead of panic.
Michael Bay directs from a script by Chris Fedak, and he shoots the action like a man who discovered a new toy. Drones dive down the sides of skyscrapers and skim under the ambulance at street level in single unbroken plunges. The camera never sits still. It spins, it rises, it falls through buildings, and the editing cuts so fast that geography dissolves into pure motion. The technique is genuinely new and it is also exhausting, because Bay applies the same maximum intensity to a freeway chase and to a phone call.
The film commits to its single idea with total conviction and no restraint. Bay wants every second to scream, so nothing in it can build. The brothers’ relationship is the emotional engine, and the movie keeps interrupting it to flip another police cruiser. There is a lean and brutal chase picture buried inside all the noise. Bay never finds it because he never stops shouting long enough to look.