Siren Song: AMBULANCE

I’ve never been disappointed in a Michael Bay car chase. Even when the movie around it is one of his lesser pictures, there’s nothing like the way he films the grit of the road, the burning rubber, the squealing turns, the crunching crashes, bone-rattling speeds, spraying debris, and geysers of fire and explosions. He takes low angles with a moving camera that goes faster and closer than you’d think possible, hurtling beyond or behind or spinning between the moving elements, filling the frame with light and motion, cutting so fast you just barely get your bearings. Think his debut Bad Boys or its outsized sequel sending cop cars careening through one obstacle after the next, or his sci-fi escape actioner The Island flinging a literal ton of construction equipment off the back of a trailer to slice apart vehicles crossing their concrete-slamming trajectories. Is it any wonder, then, that his enormous Transformers movies are something like an apotheosis of this style? What better protagonists than the cars themselves, all oil and spark and motion contorting around fleeting human interests. There’s always something exhilaratingly mechanical about Bayhem, where flesh and blood meet the cold logic of parts and gears—animated by the passion for obliterating the senses in aesthetic reverie of all of the above.

His latest, Ambulance, is an answer for anyone who ever wondered what an all-chase Bay movie could be. After a brisk setup, the action starts and never lets up. Just a few minutes in, I found myself asking: is this one of Bay’s very best efforts? The rest of the movie just keeps answering: yes, yes, yes. Somehow it flies by, but never loses its rooting interests, every image a gleaming, forceful work of propaganda for itself. The story hits the ground running, with an unemployed veteran (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), in need of lots of cash after his insurance denies coverage for his wife’s surgery, secretly meeting up with his bank robber brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a loan. Turns out, the criminal bro is just about to leave with his crew on a big heist, but they do need a driver. So off they go. This is cross-cut with an introduction to a paramedic (Eiza Gonzalez). We meet her saving the life of a little girl impaled on a railing that rammed through her mother’s car in an accident. The jaws of life spark, she cries as the EMT grips her hand, then the camera drifts down from high above the ambulance like a guardian angel as they spirit her toward the nearest ER. (Maybe it's the movie equivalent of the early pandemic days, when people would bang pots and pans out their windows in tribute to first responders.) You can tell right away that Bay’s giving this material an extra fluid grace, and some real tenderness, too. We also saw a glimpse of the brothers as children in an intuitive wordless flashback at the start, two innocents wandering down a sun-dappled Los Angeles street. All this sentimental rooting interest is sketched in with hard-charging shorthand in immediate gripping visualization. We get it instantly, the better to care just enough as the action picks up speed.

The bank robbery goes badly, a cop is shot, and the brothers escape by hijacking the ambulance that arrives for him. (Guess whose.) The rest of the movie, then, is in the same vein as Jan de Bont’s Speed or Tony Scott’s Unstoppable—wow, that’d be a triple-feature to make you hyperventilate—as a vehicle just can’t stop, can’t slow down, is always on the move. The movie doesn’t merely zoom by; it smashes, careens, swerves, drifts, and dips. We’re taken on a tour of LA at top speeds, as law enforcement assembles (Garret Dillahunt wrangles the team of cars and trucks and guns and helicopters with gruff cowboy charm) and the ambulance keeps eluding their grasp. (One imagines the screenplay could’ve been written by driving around town wondering: what would it be like to go really fast through here, or what if a car fell off that?) Bay goes all in on blue-collar process, balancing the cops’ procedures with the robbers’ clever quick thinking. He trusts his actors to sell the immediacy of the moments. Gyllenhaal is a live-wire, while Abdul-Mateen is sturdily in-over-his-head, and Gonzalez is probably Bay’s best heroine, capable and steady and thinking, defined entirely by being professional and skilled while never drooled over. We want her to survive, while the movie does a tricky two-step in keeping Gyllenhaal more purely villainous while letting Abdul-Mateen remain relatively more sympathetic. We want them to escape for his sake, but clearly see someone needs to stop them. It’s a situation out of control.

This is brute-force exhilaration and industrial-strength sentimentality wedded together in Bay’s typical eye-popping frames zipping past in pulse-scattering editing. The appeal, then, is entirely in the way the variables keep spinning around them all the way through the explosive ends. The camera is swooping and swirling, freed to hurtle along every which way, flying top-speeds along highways and under overpasses and around tight corners, peering up at the concrete canyons or spraying through puddles and fires. This is Hollywood action impressionism, a work of blurry momentum and movement in which each image is crystal clear and every shot swarms with visual interest, cut together in a smear of sparks and sounds. This is Bay at his most indulgent and yet contained, more of a piece with his early films (he winks at them in the early going as characters name-drop a couple) than the gargantuan spectacles of shape-shifting cars from outer space. He’s still excessive, but his excess (aside from a cartel gangster subplot that rides an awfully thin line of stereotypes) is committed to amping up the concept and the characters—its as out of control as its central vehicle and the guys behind the wheel. We’re hanging on for dear life like the hostages in the back. I watched it with the realization that the 57-year-old director has now passed from being a shock of the new, through a high-gloss studio pro, into something like an old master of the form.

Escape from Vegas: ARMY OF THE DEAD

If you’re going to stage a zombie outbreak and are looking for some sociopolitical resonance, you could do worse than Las Vegas. Seeing hordes of zombies milling about the slot machines or mindlessly shuffling down the strip isn’t exactly a stretch. It’s a pretty clear escalation of Romero’s use of the mall in Dawn of the Dead. Why are they there? Well, it’s what they’re used to. But really, what Zack Snyder proposes in his newest film, Army of the Dead, which, name aside, is not an extension of his remake of the Romero picture from nearly twenty years ago, is that it’d be a really neat thing to stage a heist movie inside a zombie movie. He's right. (So was Yeon Sang-ho, whose okay sequel to his great zombie actioner Train to Busan coincidentally used the same premise last year.) So why does it have to have a metaphor at all? He creates a rough future — shooting it with a smudged bleary digital paleness; ironically there are even some fleeting dead pixels in some dark scenes that had me thinking my TV was on the fritz — in which Vegas is the source of a zombie outbreak. An early scene with a speeding car accidentally smashing head-on into a military convoy transporting Patient Zero from Area 51 is a splashy start. (Car crashes are just so cinematic, no?) The city has been walled off, Escape from New York style, and is, in fact, about to be leveled with a nuclear bomb in order to stop the spread. That leaves just a few days for a casino owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) to get a team of mercenaries into his abandoned vault and rescue his money. It’s up to a mournful tough guy (Dave Bautista) to gather his forces and execute the plan.

Snyder knows what he’s doing, making a movie retrofitted from borrowed genre parts, an ambulatory homage that doesn't push too hard on anything but gore. He brings some slow-mo and needle drops and complicated world-building. But here even the lore of his take on this sort of world gathers lightly and in the margins. He’s making what might be his simplest movie. The movie gathers up some unfussy men-on-a-mission exposition in its open act, introducing a big cast of potential zombie chow to arm up and go in. Bautista is a soulful center to this thin pulp, and the fun mix of personalities around him puts Omari Hardwick next to Ella Purnell next to Garret Dillahunt next to Tig Notaro and lets their various energies crackle well enough. Then the movie spends its time plunging headlong into an extended Aliens homage the rest of the way through as the machine guns and strategy play out against hordes of dangerous undead. As bullets splatter the decomposing dead walkers, and the blood in general gathers to such ludicrous geysers that one grenade down a corridor appears to result in a gush of chili against the wall, it’s clear Snyder is enjoying the brutal goofiness inherent in his approach. 

That aside, the action is mostly hectic instead of visually striking, with Snyder, one of our last big budget visual stylists, making some of his blandest functional shots. A Romero or Verheoeven or Carpenter would’ve pushed harder on the style and satire, too, the bright lights city going to set its soul on fire. But Snyder, for all his excess and action, has some hint of a softie in him, making a movie ultimately about broken families mirrored in both humans and monsters, and with Bautista approaching the mission mostly as an excuse to repair a relationship with an estranged daughter. (Those inclined to read autobiography here will find that relationship extra poignant.) So it may be so much reanimated thrills from its inspirations, but it has just enough motivation and good structure to its hook to work at a sturdy popcorn level nonetheless.

What Goes Around Comes Around: LOOPER

Time travel is tricky for both characters and filmmakers, a gambit filled with potential plot holes, paradoxes and butterfly effects well known to anyone even glancingly familiar with this sci-fi subgenre. These kinds of movies generally litter their runtime with unanswerable questions. With Looper, writer-director Rian Johnson (he of the great high school noir film Brick) has given the time travel picture a jolt of smart intensity, embracing the concept by making unanswerable philosophical time travel questions into an advantage. It joins the classics of the subgenre (from Chris Marker’s La Jetée to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, from Shane Carruth’s Primer to James Cameron’s Terminator series) as a film that, rather than getting overwhelmed by a need to explain and explain, simply uses its time travel rules, at once utterly simple and dizzyingly complex, in the service of a great story.

Johnson knows that great science fiction starts not just with world-building or dazzling effects, although Looper does both very well, but with ground-level characters, recognizable personalities who happen to find themselves in fantastical scenarios. Take for instance the man who will be both protagonist and antagonist in this film, sometimes even at the same time. His name is Joe. He kills people for a living. More accurately, he kills people from the future. The year is 2044 and although time travel has yet to be invented, it will be soon enough. In 2074, time travel is illegal and thus only used by a crime syndicate for the sole purpose of disposing bodies. That’s where Joe and his co-workers come in.

Known as Loopers, their job is to take their guns out to the middle of nowhere, kill the future people, and collect a paycheck until the time comes that their future employers decide to “close the loop,” forcing them into retirement by killing their future selves. It’s a complicated conceit that plays out with stunning simplicity, effortlessly explained and immediately the stuff of high stakes when the time comes for Joe to close his loop. He finds himself caught off guard by his older self, who fights back and escapes. Old Joe (Bruce Willis) is now on the run from his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with makeup and prosthetics that convincingly creates an approximation of young Willis) and both are forced to flee their fellow Loopers (Jeff Daniels, Garret Dillahunt, and Noah Segan among them) who are determined to set the future straight by closing up this temporal loose end.

By the time this happens, the world of the film feels sturdy, convincing. High-tech embellishments create a world that feels almost like our own, close enough to recognize, advanced enough to feel foreign. The characters are all world-weary men, doing a messy job with professionalism. This new wrinkle in their day-to-day grind of violence by day and hard partying by night is treated with a tired tension, an urgency that is both intense and unsurprising. Something like this was bound to happen. Indeed, we’ve seen that it has at least once, but that time clean up was relatively easy. Both Joes are hard to catch. The older Joe roams the cityscape – Johnson imagines a future with both hoverbikes and pervasive homelessness – on a mission to change his fate. The younger Joe hides out with a tough farm woman (Emily Blunt) and her little boy (the adorable Pierce Gagnon).

At first, I thought I had the film pinned down as simply a fantastic man-on-the-run picture with sci-fi influences, a sort of doubled, time-shifting version of The Fugitive. But suddenly, the movie slips away and grows deeper, darker, sadder, and more beautiful. To even suggest the shape the story takes from here would be a disservice to you, reader. This is most definitely a film that plays even better with a joyful sense of discovery. Let me just say that the film finds surprising, upsetting, exciting, and rather moving ways to circle its main thematic concerns about what makes a person become the person they will ultimately be. This is a thriller with plenty of gunplay, chase scenes, cold-blooded murder (most shockingly of total innocents), and seamless special effects, but Johnson treats these developments with a weight and seriousness.  The performances are completely convincing and, through the characters and the style, which is flashy and distinct without once overwhelming the driving story, the film feels grounded in a way that many films of its ilk don’t. Looper contains notes of deep darkness that are treated without sensationalism. Here, violence hurts. Injuries have consequences. Scars linger.

This film thrillingly skirts past all the usual pitfalls and creates an exciting and cohesive film that is violent and cynical, but romantic and humanistic as well. Johnson embraces these apparent contradictions to follow loops of plot to the kind of climax that feels at once startling and wholly inevitable. Looking back on its entirety, it’s easy to see how fully and neatly Johnson has led us to this point. This ingeniously structured movie, neat and tidy by the end, is skillfully complex, a movie that operates from a set of rules that seem fully thought through, inhabiting a world rather than using it as narratively convenient. With Steve Yedlin’s warm yet precise cinematography of great pictorial beauty, from the steel-and-concrete, graffiti-covered streets of downtown to the dusty fields of farmland, recalling the casual gracefulness in the down-to-earth sci-fi of early Spielberg, it’s a story of imagination and emotion set against a detailed futuristic environment that feels detailed in compelling ways that nonetheless remain in the background with minimal fuss. This is a world, not merely a stage.

And on this stage, inner conflict exploded outwards. The central drama of the film is nothing less than a man fighting to become a better man by changing his circumstances, an older man literally drawn into combat with his younger self. There’s a tense, funny scene between the two versions in a diner that brings new meaning to the phrase “talking to yourself.” Whether one realizes it or not, each second takes a person away from the person one is now and towards the person one will become. For Joe, time travel has brought this process into sharp focus. Both versions have a chance to regard the entirety of his life to date and decide how best to get out of this situation with their life (and maybe even the world) better off. But is this even possible with outside forces and circumstances crushing in on them (him)?

Johnson patiently complicates the scenario, sketching details of plot with camera moves that silently reveal new information and shot compositions that cement tension and power dynamics. He off-handedly introduces concepts that will come roaring back into focus later. Here is a movie about fate that feels inevitable but vibrant, a movie about choices that feels carefully designed. Like all the best time travel movies, when it ended I felt the pleasant confusion that made me want to see it again, to diagram the timelines and figure out what, in the end, remains real and what has been cancelled out. Best of all, I felt confident that I very well could do just that. Looper is a film so emotionally engaged and technologically accomplished, so confident in the rules of its universe, that there’s a feeling its implications resonate far beyond any given frame, beyond the focus of this particular story. Johnson has created the rare film that seems to expand.

The First Cut is the Deepest: WINTER'S BONE

Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a thriller that chills in ways that set it apart from most other thrillers. There’s a chilliness that sets in during the opening scenes, and before I knew it the chill was bone deep. It’s a chill that goes further than the film’s pale blue coloring and the wintry setting, with pale faces, crunchy steps and icy puffs of breath. It’s a chill that comes from cold actions and intentions, from cold hearts and harsh realities of the character’s lives.

The film is anchored by a powerful performance from 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence who stars as a small-town Missouri teenager left by her deadbeat, drug-dealer dad to take care of her younger brother and sister and their invalid mother. The plot is set in motion when the sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) shows up to say that her missing father has a looming court date and has put up the property as his bail. If he doesn’t show, they’ll lose their house.

The teen sets out to find her father. At every turn the suspicious townsfolk who usually run in the same circles as the man claim they haven’t seen him in a while. But their eyes and demeanors hint at darker truths. This small-town society is closing in our lead. Even her uncle (John Hawkes) would rather forget about his missing brother than plunge into the question of the man’s whereabouts. There’s a conspiratorial nature that’s striving to keep secrets hidden, all the more dangerous for being a collection of people who all know each other, who have deep, tangled roots.

There are those who would keep the truth of her father’s location hidden. If she doesn’t find out the truth soon, her family will be homeless. They barely have the resources to survive as it is. They get by on luck, thriftiness, and the kindness of their neighbors. The menacing figures lurking around the plot are no more menacing than the threat of being pushed even further down the economic ladder.

There’s a realism on display here, building a picture of a community wherein crushing poverty is nearly as dangerous as the film’s central mystery. The specifics of the setting and character ground the frightening, chilling moments to come. It’s a subdued ache of a film that borders on becoming a slice of ice-cold southern gothic.

The restraint on display only heightens the anguish. It’s upsetting to see the girl beaten and intimidated, but it’s nearly as upsetting to watch the parallel story of their financial situation. They, and the people in their community, are endlessly trying to scrape up enough to keep living. This is not a film that looks down its nose in pity on the less fortunate. This is a film that locates their basic humanness and surrounds them with production design that feels just right. Too often though, Granik lets the local color overpower plot and character. Luckily such lapses don’t overpower the film as a whole.

The film builds to very disturbing scene, despite having the grisliest moments kept out of frame (small spoiler: it involves a rowboat and a chainsaw). But the scene that hit me the hardest is one of the smallest. After hunting squirrels, the lead’s 12-year-old brother scoops out a slimy handful of squirrel guts and asks his big sister “Do we eat these parts?” Her reply: “Not yet.”