Ambulance (2022) on Netflix
Will Sharp, an Afghanistan Marine veteran, cannot cover his wife's surgery. His adoptive brother Danny, a career criminal, offers him a place on a $32 million bank heist.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.1/10114,875 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes68%
Trailer
Plot summary
Danny, a career criminal, offers his adoptive brother Will Sharp a place on a $32 million bank heist. Will is an Afghanistan Marine veteran who needs the money for his wife Amy's surgery, and he agrees to drive the getaway car. The plan nearly works until Officer Zach walks into the bank to ask a teller out and is taken hostage. A shootout follows between a heist crew member and Officer Mark, Zach's partner. The LAPD's Special Investigation Section arrives, and Will and Danny retreat toward the garage, then hijack an ambulance carrying EMT Cam Thompson and the injured Zach.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ambulance (2022)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Michael Bay only made the film because COVID-19 shut down his next picture, Black Five. He told his agent he was tired of being locked up at home and wanted to shoot something fast, then pitched Universal chairwoman Donna Langley a small film about people trapped in a tight space.
- The production borrowed six ambulances from Falck and used three for the interiors: one driven with the crew aboard, one that came apart, and one rocked on a stage. There was so little room that Jake Gyllenhaal held the camera himself on some takes.
- Much of the film was shot with racing drones. Executive producer Michael Kase found LightCraft after seeing their footage atop the Wilshire Grand Center, and Drone Racing League pilots Jordan Temkin and Alex Vanover flew the shots wearing head-mounted displays.
- On day one Bay spotted patrol officers and three motorcycle cops near the freeway shoot, offered them parts in the film, and talked them into running a rolling roadblock. Closing the freeway that way cost nothing instead of the usual 350,000 to 400,000 dollars.
- The crew won access to the corner taking in Los Angeles City Hall, Times Mirror Square and LAPD headquarters for just 19 minutes of usable daylight, and Bay spent part of it wrestling his own English Mastiff into a small vehicle. He calls it his hardest day on the shoot.
- The helicopter chase down the Los Angeles River was never in the script. Bay invented it over a weekend when two helicopters became free, shot it in two and a half hours with pilot Fred North, and had Gyllenhaal hang off the ambulance door himself instead of a stuntman.
- Bay posted video on Instagram of a stunt in which the ambulance plows into several vehicles. The mayor and the governor attacked the clip for endangering the crew, Instagram censored it, and Bay spent an hour with Collider explaining that the crash had been perfectly planned.
- Bay says the unit shot 90 to 120 setups a day where most films manage 20 to 30, which he puts down to working without a video village, a director's chair or a trailer and standing at the camera beside the actors.
