Now that Michael Bay has mercifully ended his association with the Transformers franchise, he can go back to doing what he does best; namely, creating big budget action blockbusters that place the focus firmly on practical pyrotechnics and getting as up close and personal with the carnage as possible instead of having walls of pixels incomprehensibly smashing into each other.
Netflix’s 6 Underground gave an indication of what a Michael Bay movie looks like when the filmmaker is afforded complete creative freedom, and it turned out exactly as you’d expect. All of his signature visual flourishes were present and accounted for and the set pieces were undeniably impressive, but the plot was complete nonsense, the dialogue was terrible and the characters paper thin.
That being said, nobody crafts tangible destruction quite like Bay does, and true to form, he’s shared an explosive behind the scenes look at his upcoming action thriller Ambulance, with the camera crew getting much closer to the action than anticipated, and even coming perilously close to finding themselves wiped out by a rogue vehicle or two.
The brief clip certainly makes Ambulance look as though it’s right up Bay’s street, but it sounds a lot more interesting on the surface than the director’s usual one-dimensional action output. Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II star as a pair of thieves who hijack an ambulance with a paramedic and a critically injured patient inside, and the project was initially described as a relatively contained three-hander.
Obviously, this is Michael Bay we’re talking about, so the scope and scale will have no doubt been increased exponentially, but as a remake of a low budget Danish thriller, it presents an entirely different sort of premise for the Bad Boys and The Rock helmer to tackle.