Ambulance review: Michael Bay’s latest is large, loud but a bit two-dimensional

Ambulance                                                                                   Cert: 15, 2hrs 16mins

Rating:

The Worst Person In The World                                         Cert: 15, 2hrs 8mins

Rating:

Michael Bay is still best known as the director of Bad Boys, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon before he got distracted more recently by the lucrative but career-stalling Transformers franchise.

Nevertheless, his creative hallmarks remain guns, big explosions and car chases, and all three feature large and deafeningly loud in Ambulance, which was shot in Los Angeles during the pandemic.

At its throbbing heart, it’s one big, macho adrenaline rush with Jake Gyllenhaal and Aquaman star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II playing adopted brothers who rob a bank together, only for the whole thing to go horribly wrong.

Their only means of escape is to hijack an ambulance – that already has a resourceful paramedic (Eiza González) and a badly wounded police officer on board.

Within minutes, they’re being pursued by pretty much the entire LAPD. It’s almost an hour longer than the 2005 Danish film on which it is based and has echoes of both The Taking Of Pelham 123 and Speed.

Preposterous and two-dimensional, occasional flashes of humour show we’re not meant to be taking it too seriously. But if big-action films are your thing, this will probably hit the mildly exhausting spot.

Julie is a young woman living in Oslo. She’s in her late 20s but can’t decide what she wants to do with her life or what sort of man she would like to share that life with.

Does that make her The Worst Person In The World, as the title of Joachim Trier’s much-admired new drama suggests, or perfectly ordinary?

Thanks to the intelligence of the screenplay, the cleverness of the film-making and the quiet brilliance of Renate Reinsve in the central performance, you’ll enjoy deciding.