Ambulance (2022)

Michael Bay's Ambulance arrives as a remake of a Danish thriller, a fact the film treats with the solemnity of a tax audit. It is a heist picture built around adoptive brothers, a hijacked emergency vehicle, and a paramedic performing improvised surgery while helicopters circle overhead. The cultural register is low and steady. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza González occupy prominent roles with an ease that feels ordinary, which is the correct outcome for a mainstream action film. Their presence is not accompanied by commentary, and the movie does not pause to congratulate itself for casting them.

Elsewhere the progressive ledger is mostly blank. There are no LGBTQ themes, no climate sermon, no body positivity subplot, no neurodivergent arc, and no revisionist history. Cam Thompson is resourceful and stands up to her captors, yet her competence is standard action-heroine material, not an argument. The healthcare system appears as a plot engine: Will needs money for his wife's surgery, so he robs a bank. That is a glancing critique of American medical costs, delivered with the subtlety of a siren. It never becomes a systemic indictment. The film has a Black protagonist and a veteran's desperation, but it makes no racial argument.

Bay directs with kinetic impunity. The lecture energy is nearly absent. This is not a film that scolds its audience; it throws drones, ambulances, and Jake Gyllenhaal at them. The result is a curious specimen: a 2022 action movie with a diverse cast and a faint healthcare grievance, yet almost no appetite for moral instruction. We are left with spectacle, a modest social flicker, and the sound of sirens. The classification is straightforward.