Ambulance | pow! pow! You are dead ! ★★

Desperate, an army veteran dumped by the system turns to his half-brother, a notorious criminal, for help paying for the surgery his wife, who is suffering from cancer, needs. The latter then offers to join him in orchestrating one of the biggest bank robberies in the history of Los Angeles.

Marc-Andre Lussier
The Press

The duration ofambulancethe Danish thriller whose Ambulance is the remake, was barely 80 minutes. Taken in Michael Bay sauce, the story imagined by Laurits Munch-Petersen in 2005 is artificially inflated and stretches over an hour more. True to his style, the director of transformers offers here a agitated action film where it explodes on all sides, all sides, in favor of a uselessly twirling camera.

The set is however hardly inventive in terms of frantic races in the streets and on the highways of Los Angeles, during which we obviously smash displays of all kinds. The humorous replies that we try to insert in the middle of action scenes most often fall flat.

Fresh out of The Guilty, a new version of another Danish thriller, Jake Gyllenhaal tries somehow to bring some credibility to Danny, his criminal character. The situations in which the two protagonists are plunged (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II embodies Will, Danny’s brother) however so often border on the ridiculous that it becomes difficult to subscribe to the moral dilemma facing the two men, whose nature is moreover different from that presented in the original film.

The artisans of this remake Hollywood also couldn’t help but lend themselves to a glorification of gun culture and making a spectacle of violence. Not surprising to see the two brothers briefly in their childhood playing cowboys by shooting each other. The Pow! pow! You are dead ! is now carried over into their adult lives as a way of life. Over here automatic weapons!

Ambulance however has the merit of reminding our fond memories of the song Sailing. The tube of Christopher Cross, an artist who experienced a meteoric rise in the early 1980s before completely disappearing from circulation, is indeed used wisely. At least that’s it.

Ambulance is currently playing in Quebec in its original and French version.

Thriller

Ambulance

Michael Bay

With Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González

2:16 a.m.

★★