Cinema: Ambulance offers intelligent thrill ride and clashing complex characters

What’s not to like?

Maybe it dips just a little bit in the middle and could comfortably have lost a quarter of an hour from its running time somewhere along the way.

But otherwise Ambulance offers a pretty breathless thrill ride – a thrill ride, importantly, centring on interesting, complex characters, offering plenty of moral challenges, especially as it presents pretty much everything from the viewpoint of the baddies.

Except they are not total baddies. And the longer it goes on, with the changing relationships between them, the greater and more absorbing are the moral ambiguities it throws up.

This isn’t a knuckleheaded car chase movie; it’s got flashes of an appealing wit, a patient set-up and a plot line which twists and turns endlessly even when, on the face of it, not an awful lot is happening.

The starting point is that decorated veteran Will Sharp (Emmy winner Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) simply can’t get the money he needs to get the medical treatment his ailing wife requires. He dotes on her; they both dote on their baby boy.

And so in desperation he turns to his bad-boy step brother in the hope of a loan. Instead, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) drags him into a bank job which inevitably and fairly quickly goes horrendously wrong.

There’s a bizarre implausibility in Danny having a vacancy in his not-so-crack criminal team at such short notice, and it’s weirder still that he drags in someone so unversed in crime. Maybe he sees Will’s military background as all the training he needs.

But before long they are in desperate straits having hijacked an ambulance as their only way out. In the back is a cop Will has shot and feisty paramedic Cam Thompson (Eiza González) whose reputation is that she can keep anyone alive for 20 minutes but none of her colleagues actually want to work with her.

Chasing them are endless cop cars and cop helicopters – and maybe this is the bit where the film dips just a little before rallying again for the strongest of showdowns.

Cam identifies Will as a baddie who’s actually a goodie at heart and, secretly in contact with the FBI from the back of the ambulance, she is urged to work on him as the weak link in the set-up. Abdul-Mateen gives a great performance as a decent guy unwittingly caught up in something awful.

Meanwhile Gyllenhaal is investing Danny with a charisma that somehow leads us to overlook just what a dirty brutal rat he actually is.

The point is that director Michael Bay, quite apart from all the chasing, the crashing cars and the explosions which punctuate the whole thing, has thrown together a cast of characters which keeps us invested in it all.

There’s real cut and thrust between the characters with just as much drama happening inside the ambulance as is happening outside it. And once the pace picks up again, it’s relentless stuff through to its final flourishes, all underpinned by first-class acting all round.

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