“Ambulance” (MA) ***

MOVIE audiences fall into two broad groups. 

One, probably the bigger, sees director Michael Bay’s film “Ambulance” as a terrific action thriller, which, warts and all – and there are plenty – it undoubtedly is. 

The other (to which I belong) sees it as a paradigm of 21st century America and judges it terrifying – which it also undoubtedly is. The thought of living in a nation where the events it displays might be commonplace scares me.

From the go “Ambulance” (a remake of a 2005 Danish film of the same name – so what did Chris Fedak do to earn a writer’s credit for this one?) looks like a Jake Gyllenhaal vanity – he even got on to ABC Breakfast News to talk about it! 

Jake plays Danny. Today’s his 38th bank heist. By coincidence, the child of his adoptive black brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) needs money for experimental surgery. Come along on the heist, bro’. You can drive the get-away car.

Apparently, ambulances in the US are commercial enterprises; first to arrive gets the gig. The crew of this one has just finished breakfast nearby. The heist is in progress. A cop has been shot. 

Meet ambo Cam (Eiza González) who, by the time the resulting chase comes to a screeching halt outside a famous hospital’s emergency entrance about two hours screen time later, has been scared, assaulted and instructed over the phone by a surgeon about performing surgery to remove the bullet from the shot cop’s innards. Quite a gal, this Cam. Limited vocabulary; one word used a big lot in its many forms (but never seen on these pages).

“Ambulance” spends about two hours’ screen time breaking just about every traffic safety rule in the book, willy-nilly destroying moving and stationary property and getting sprayed icky green to hide it from the cop cars, choppers and media drones covering the event.

There’s much more, but the final verdict has to be, as the “Hollywood Reporter” put it, “the sort of cinematic thrill ride so overstuffed that you can’t wait for it to be over”.

At all cinemas