From Heat to Unstoppable to Michael Bay's own Bad Boys, there are plenty of great action movies to check out after Ambulance.
It might not be saying much to describe Ambulance as one of Michael Bay’s greatest movies, but based on the warm critical response, it’s fair to say that this movie is much better than anybody was expecting. It’s an old-school action thriller that proves Bay does his best work with mid-range budgets and relatively grounded stories.
Ambulance is anchored by two great performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as bank-robbing brothers whose heist gone awry turns the movie into a feature-length police chase. After watching Ambulance, there are plenty of other action movies to check out with the same visceral intensity, high-octane chase sequences, and themes of brotherly love.
Michael Bay’s first movie – 1995’s Bad Boys – established his distinctively bonkers style of high-octane action out of the gate. Like Ambulance, Bad Boys is an explosive action thriller about brotherly love.
Mike and Marcus weren’t raised by the same father like Will and Danny, but Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s bickering “buddy cop” partners are as close as brothers.
The central dynamic in Ambulance, pairing up a violent sociopath and a more ethical counterpoint, evokes Antoine Fuqua’s action-packed two-hander Training Day.
Ethan Hawke stars as a rookie cop opposite an Oscar-winning Denzel Washington as the corrupt veteran detective tasked with showing him the ropes.
Although the tension inside the ambulance is what’s really interesting, there’s plenty of well-staged vehicular carnage in Bay’s latest opus. After the heist goes awry and Will and Danny steal an ambulance, the movie becomes a feature-length police chase.
One of the greatest police chase movies in recent memory is Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, starring Ansel Elgort as a getaway driver who drives to the rhythm of his iPod playlists.
One of Ben Affleck’s most acclaimed directorial efforts, The Town, is a gritty old-school crime thriller that tells the story of four lifelong friends who decide to rob a bank in Boston.
Affleck also leads the star-studded cast, surrounded by such iconic supporting players as Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, Chris Cooper, and Pete Postlethwaite. Like Ambulance, The Town uses the external conflict of a bank heist to explore themes of brotherhood.
Underrated filmmaker S. Craig Zahler is bringing back classic exploitation cinema in style with ultraviolent action thrillers that push the boundaries of on-screen gore. His grisly neo-noir Dragged Across Concrete is a prime example.
Two crooked cops, played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn (who Zahler reinvented as a grisly action hero in Brawl in Cell Block 99) stake out a band of bank robbers. But they don’t intend to turn them in; they intend to keep the loot for themselves. Like Ambulance, Dragged Across Concrete is an intense, action-heavy thriller anchored by a pair of antiheroes who deeply care about each other.
In Ambulance, Will can’t stop the ambulance because he and his brother will either be arrested or killed by the pursuing cops. In Speed, Sandra Bullock can’t stop the bus because it’s been rigged with a bomb that will explode if the speed drops below 50mph.
Keanu Reeves stars as the plucky cop determined to rescue the passengers of the bus. Speed is an obvious play on the Die Hard formula, but its public transport setting is wholly unique, the ticking bomb adds an overriding sense of Hitchcockian tension, and Reeves’ no-nonsense performance helps to set Jack Traven apart from John McClane.
David Ayer’s End of Watch applies the “found footage” framework to a cop movie. Not only did it bring a fresh angle to a well-worn format in desperate need of one; it brought refreshingly grounded action to a classic police noir.
Ambulance’s Jake Gyllenhaal stars opposite a co-star who’s equally as well-matched as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. In End of Watch, Michael Peña plays Gyllenhaal’s ride-or-die partner.
Tony Scott’s final film, Unstoppable, is a fast-moving two-hander like Ambulance. It similarly cross-cuts between various perspectives as a massive external conflict unfolds at breakneck speed. Denzel Washington and Chris Pine star as a pair of railway employees (a veteran getting pushed out by management and one of the unionized youngsters replacing his generation, respectively) tasked with bringing a runaway train to a halt.
Like Ambulance, Unstoppable is a non-stop actioner that constantly raises the stakes as it barrels through unpredictable twists and turns (and, with a runtime clocking in a half-hour shorter than Ambulance, it’s a leaner, tauter movie, too).
The peak of Bayhem, 1996’s The Rock, could be described as “Die Hard on Alcatraz Island.” It stars Nicolas Cage as a geeky weapons specialist and Sean Connery as a fearless SAS badass (who’s basically an older, gruffer version of James Bond).
Like Ambulance, The Rock proves that Bay does his best work on relatively grounded non-I.P. mid-budget action thrillers. Ambulance even has a nod to The Rock’s iconic “f*** the prom queen” line.
With its visceral intensity, Los Angeles setting, and foiled bank robbery followed by a police shootout in the street, Ambulance plays like an homage to Michael Mann’s action-packed neo-noir masterpiece Heat.
This was the first time Al Pacino and Robert De Niro shared the screen, and it’s a mind-blowing epic worthy of the talents of two of the world’s greatest actors. Heat is a riveting cat-and-mouse thriller about an erratic detective on the trail of a meticulous bank robber, featuring some of the greatest action sequences ever put on film.
