With the LA-set robbery-gone-wrong spectacle “Ambulance,” Michael Bay returns to his mayhem roots – that part of his career when he didn’t need a lot of CGI, but still didn’t know how to shoot action cohesively.
Can one be nostalgic for a filmmaker villain’s destructive origins? It might not matter if what you’re really pining for is the authentic gnarl of actual vehicles moving at top speeds on real streets, for multiple genuine collisions and true explosions, in an age when the common fare for thrill-seekers is digitized superheroes and green-screened action.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing when directors can’t help themselves; fetishes can be fun! But even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this...
Can one be nostalgic for a filmmaker villain’s destructive origins? It might not matter if what you’re really pining for is the authentic gnarl of actual vehicles moving at top speeds on real streets, for multiple genuine collisions and true explosions, in an age when the common fare for thrill-seekers is digitized superheroes and green-screened action.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing when directors can’t help themselves; fetishes can be fun! But even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this...
- 3/24/2022
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
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