BEFORE: Another film that I managed a screening of, but that was almost three years ago, in April 2022. This film has managed to fall through the cracks, again and again, or perhaps my linking just never circled around to it, that could happen. Anyway it's past time to clear it off the list, the film has long ago left cable, heck it was on AmazonPrime and it's somehow scrolled off of that as well. Guys, that's not a good sign, if people were watching it then it would still be available, and it's not. Sure, films come and go and films are streaming and then not, but films that people want to see tend to cycle back, and this one, not so much. That is NOT a good sign. Oh well, I guess I have to watch the DVD I made, with no captions, that's going to make things a bit more difficult, but if this is a stinker, all the more reason to burn it off tonight.
Eiza Gonzalez carries over from "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare". It's been a quick month, and the February romance films are in sight - I got to some MAJOR films in January already, and I'm already 1/12 through the new year. Progress has been made, for sure, but now I have to stop and watch THIS nonsense.
THE PLOT: Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes away.
AFTER: Veteran Will needs money for his wife's surgery, so he hits up his brother (adopted, foster, or just brother from another mother? This is also unclear...) for a job, only to find out the only position available is on his bank-robbing crew. Yes, this would have been a good time to exit the interview. But for some reason Will agrees to help rob the bank, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Besides everything, that is.
Everything here just feels like it's more trouble than it's worth - even with the millions that they stole from the bank, surely there must have been an easier way to do it. But even from a movie-watching standpoint, every twist in this story feels like pulling teeth, so that by the end you wonder if it was even worth doing in the first place. Is it worth stealing $18 million if everybody on your crew dies, except for two people? Is it worth making your getaway in an ambulance if you have to deal with a goody-two-shoes EMT and a dying cop on a gurney? No, it probably is not. You can really feel the screenwriter here, making the lives of the main characters more and more difficult at every turn, to the point of outright insanity. I mean, you have to think even a bank robber would realize that if he turns himself in, he's got a chance at living, but to keep on compounding the problem with a high-speed chase, that's just plain nuts.
The whole CITY is watching, there are police helicopters and news helicopters following this ambulance around, so really, how far are they going to get? And OK, MAYBE they save the life of this cop who's been shot, but how many MORE police personnel and civilians die in the high-speed chase, all those car crashes, and several explosions? And so many NITPICK POINTS tonight, like how did the Special Investigation cops get there so fast? Were they meeting for coffee like a block away, or were they tipped off about the job? No idea, and the movie doesn't bother to make this clear.
The bit when a woman gets on the elevator, and the thieves are wearing masks, and SHE'S wearing a mask, because of COVID. And the bit with the multiple dummy ambulances, when the main ambulance hides under the highway and Danny somehow got the Hispanic community to have SIX ambulances flee the scene, so the cops don't know which one to chase. It's a bit cartoonish, like where did they get all of those ambulances with the SAME exact design (because L.A. is a big city, and may use a few different types of ambulance, with different paint jobs) so no, it doesn't make any sense and then the movie still finds a way to make this stupid, but there's almost the essence of a good idea there. Getting one of Danny's dimwit friends to show up to paint the ambulance is the worst idea of all time, because he only has bright neon green paint, and the point was to disguise the ambulance, not make it even EASIER to see. Plus to do a real solid paint job that would HIDE the ambulance would take hours, and Danny only gives the guy 45 seconds, so the job looks like crap. NITPICK POINT: Even if the guy could do a really solid paint job on the ambulance, it would still be shaped like an ambulance, so this numbskull idea was doomed from the start.
So many other things don't make ANY sense here, like the fact that this ambulance is in motion for so long that the chop-shop guys Danny calls have the time to BUILD cars that will help them out, like remote-controlled cars that have remote-controlled pop-up machine guns in them. They did NOT have that one ready to go at the start, because how would they have known that they needed that? This is some Wile E. Coyote shit here, because it's not normal, and it should have taken hours, if not DAYS, to build that. And in all those hours, the entirety of the L.A. police force can't figure out how to put down a spike strip in this ambulance's path, or shoot out its tires or something? Give me a break. The ambulance could have been in San Francisco by the time they get it to stop. It should have run out of gas at some point, and we never see it refueling, oh, there's no time for that, but there's time to listen to Christopher Cross? Dumb dumb dumb.
OK, maybe a point for showing that the lead FBI investigator is in a therapy session with his husband. Sure, it's a bit of forced DEI to say that a tough guy who's in charge of solving bank robberies in the L.A. federal district can also be gay, but it's as close to social progress as we're going to get here. Still, I'd like to see the paperwork on this one. Any social gains here are probably negated by being a token nod to the zeitgeist, not feeling genuine, and also not being relevant to the plot in any way - it's the equivalent of making sure your company's holiday commercial has a mixed-race couple in it, we all know why you're doing it and you're sure not very sincere about it. Also this same lead FBI investigator just happened to go to FBI training school with Danny, who was there for different reasons? Come on, give me a break, what are the freakin' odds?
And what was the idea behind driving the ambulance down into that famous Los Angeles river causeway thing? Sure, it looks cool when the helicopters fly down into it and chase the ambulance, but what was the plan? We assume Danny had one, but we never learn what it was, as a result all he did was make the vehicle more visible to the cops and easier to track. Driving down the highway in the wrong direction, same thing, the resulting risk outweighed any rewards for getting away from the police, temporarily. Nah, sure, let's steal the most visible vehicle ever, the one with all the lights and sirens, because we can probably sneak away in that.
A better solution might have been to, I don't know, stop the ambulance when they had a chance, maybe park it kind of close to a hospital so the injured cop has a fighting chance, and then, I don't know, maybe walk away quietly from the vehicle, just two guys carrying their gym clothes in bags and then getting to a diner where they sit quietly at a table and blend in for a few hours? No way, not going to happen in a Michael Bay film, that's for sure.
And if this movie feels ultra-long, like stretched out with no end in sight, it could be because it's based on a Danish film from 2005 that is a full hour shorter. That film was only 80 minutes long and shot all in one take, the cast and crew rehearsed for three months to work everything out so they would get the film made much more quickly. Yes, in many cases shorter is better. The U.S. version was shot during the pandemic, which was a unique opportunity to shoot empty or nearly-empty streets in L.A., normally the traffic capital of the world.
Also starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last heard in "Strange World"), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Garret Dillahunt (last seen in "Army of the Dead"), Keir O'Donnell (last seen in 'When in Rome"), Jackson White, Olivia Stambouliah, Moses Ingram, Colin Woodell (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Cedric Sanders (last seen in "The Social Network"), A Martinez (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Jesse Garcia (last seen in "The Mother"), Jose Pablo Cantillo (last seen in "Disturbia"), Wale Folarin, Devan Chandler Long, Randazzo Marc, Victor Gojcaj (last seen in "The Forger"), Briella Guiza, Brendan Miller (last seen in "Project X"), Remi Adeleke (last seen in "Plane"), Jamie McBride, Corey Portugal, Jenn Proske, Kayli Tran, Brendan Robinson (last seen in "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon"), Annabelle Gurwitch (last seen in "Pollock"), David Farcy, Stephen Resnick, Cici Lau (last seen in "Babylon"), Jesse Gabbard (last seen in "6 Underground"), McColm Cephas Jr. (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Andy Favreau (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Max Ferro, Charlotte Xia.
RATING: 3 out of 10 surgeons on a zoom call (because that ambulance somehow has a great wifi connection as it speeds through the different zones of the city, and it never loses the signal...)
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