Ambulance Review

Loosely remade from a Danish thriller and shot fast in Los Angeles for a fraction of a Transformers budget, this is Bay rediscovering that a chase needs a container. Almost the whole film happens inside one speeding vehicle, and the constraint sharpens him. The camerawork is genuinely new. Small racing drones dive down the faces of buildings, skim under moving cars and whip around the ambulance at street level, and it produces a sense of pursuit that a helicopter never could.

Jake Gyllenhaal is doing something wild as the adopted brother whose charm curdles by the minute. Yahya Abdul Mateen II gives the film its only ballast, and Eiza Gonzalez has to sell field surgery on a moving gurney while playing a character defined entirely by competence. The script is thin in the places that matter, the wife's operation and the dog are emotional shorthand rather than stakes, and at a hundred and thirty six minutes a chase film is at least half an hour past its natural length. Still, a real return to form.