Tag Archives: Ambulance

Ambulance (2022). The pain of watching this was real.

Always thought Michael Bay was/is a phenomenal visual stylist and technical master – he just requires a good script. 

Before he made Pearl Harbor (2001) he wasn’t just Mr. Hit & Miss, and The Island (2005) is a riot. The rest of his oeuvre is admittedly pish. And Ambulance (2022) is the last title for a film I’d imagine being made by the chieftain of mayhem. And fucking hell is it terrible.

It went on and on and on and on and an hour in it felt like the length of a David Lean picture but without any of the talent. This was ambulances, sirens, bullets, screeching, whizzing, more bullets, dreadful dialogue, shoddy acting, cop cars, choppers, more bullets, more noises, zero characterisation, and more noises. And all tied together with a jarring pointlessness, like, there is no bloody point to anything that happens. I’ve also experienced more captivating shites and once watched a French Bulldog lick its own balls and this was more absorbing than Ambulance.

I turned it off and then even gave up on the Wikipedia plot. 

What a load of wank!

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Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

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Scorsese’s last movie of the ’90s is curiously his weakest work. It’s a lazy narrative that seems enamoured with MTV standards/trends of cinematography. It also suffers from ‘The Affliction’: the liberal use of popular music tracks to paper over deficiencies in the script.

It’s a promising concept: Nicolas Cage’s paramedic, physically and emotionally drained, drives around an early ’90s Manhattan – by all accounts a crack-strewn cesspit at that time – in search of the high of saving a life, and a broader redemption as he’s haunted by those he couldn’t save.

By the one-hour mark the picture sadly has nowhere to go. There are a few moments of transcendence, particularly the final shot, but it’s all rather boring, from the cartoon character supporting roles to Cage’s … bored performance. One suspects it could have worked better as a small-scale picture, Mean Streets (1973) with a defibrillator.

The life of an ambulance driver has never looked so torporific. One of the very few Scorsese pictures I’ll pass on should it ever crop up again.

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