This may be the most annoying movie ever made.
It’s certainly one of the worst.
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| With his get-rich-quick bank heist gone south, deranged psychopath Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal, left) screams at the pursuing police vehicles to "Stay back!", while his adopted brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) tries to keep their speeding ambulance on the road. |
The English language, graced with such a vast and colorful collection of adjectives and adverbs, is insufficient to adequately explain just how deplorable this film is. (But I shall try.)
Chris Fedak’s bone-stupid, so-called script hasn’t a shred of credibility, and his dialogue is as limp as a dead banana. The one-dimensional acting ranges from ludicrously stoic — notably Garret Dillahunt’s somnambulant, I’ve-wandered-in-from-another-movie portrayal of LAPD tactical SIS Capt. Monroe — to over-the-top, foaming-at-the-mouth derangement (Jake Gyllenhaal, take a bow for a performance so bad, you’re guaranteed a Razzzie Award).
Cinematographer Roberto De Angelis relies heavily on swooping, swooshing, barrel-roll, upside-down, skyscraper-hugging drone shots guaranteed to send unprepared viewers into motion-sickness shock: all assembled and cut at hyperspeed by a team of editors — Doug Brandt, Pietro Scalia and Calvin Wimmer — who obviously laced their morning coffee with meth.
Note to Mr. Bay: The mere fact that you can do something with drone cameras, doesn’t mean you should. And the result sure as hell isn’t anything approaching art or craft.
Not even 10 minutes into this barrage of wretched excess, I was fighting vertigo and nausea.
The “story,” such as it is.
Decorated military veteran Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), at wit’s end trying to navigate insurance restrictions, can’t get clearance for the expensive surgery required to fix his wife’s unspecified medical condition. (Of course it’s unspecified; otherwise, Fedak would have had to do actual research.)
Will therefore — unwisely — seeks a loan from his motor-mouthed career criminal brother, Danny (Gyllenhaal). Instead, Will gets roped into joining a motley, heavy caliber-toting crew on a “perfectly planned” heist to steal $32 million from a nearby bank.
Elsewhere, we meet plucky ambulance EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González), who can “keep anybody alive for 20 minutes, but can’t keep a partner.” She trades flirty, tone-deaf banter with newly assigned colleague Scott (Colin Woodell).
Elsewhere, we meet patrol officer Mark (Cedric Sanders), who encourages his rookie partner Zach (Jackson White) to try for a date with a cute teller at — wouldn’t you just know it — the same bank Danny’s crew is about to hit.
The heist goes predictably awry, resulting in a bullet-vomiting gun battle with Monroe’s troops, who — in a controversial SWAT tactic discredited years before this film was made — knew this would go down, and therefore have shadowed the bank, waiting for the bad guys to exit (the obvious peril faced by employees and customers be damned).
Naturally, because this is a dumb-bunny movie, the bad guys’ military-grade weapons fire can’t hit the broad side of a barn, let alone any of the approaching cops. When the dust settles, only Danny and Will remain on the run; poor Officer Zach, gut-shot, is a hostage; that prompts a call to Cam and Scott’s ambulance; Danny and Will commandeer the vehicle, and toss Scott onto the tarmac; Cam remains, so she can try to keep Zach alive … while roaring down L.A. roads and freeways, with dozens (scores? hundreds?) of police vehicles and a handful of helicopters close behind.
Did I mention that Monroe shows up with his massive, slobbery dog?
We’re only 40 minutes into this mess, and I’m thinking … where can we possibly go from here?
Stupid question.
The 1973 American television season included a laughably dumb series called Chase, which starred Mitchell Ryan as the head of an “unorthodox” team of LAPD cops piloting anything with an engine. The title credits sequence featured Ryan and his grim-faced colleagues thundering toward the camera via motorcycle, hot rod, police car and helicopter, because, well, apparently that was the height of TV excitement in 1973.
Lame as that sequence was, it lasted only a brief 40 seconds.
Imagine it prolonged for an hour and a half.
I ain’t kidding.
The rest of this film is dominated by just that: an endless stream of vehicles chasing the ambulance from one end of Los Angeles to the other, and then back again, punctuated every couple of minutes by the destruction of another black-and-white when Will’s demolition derby-style driving forces it over a cliff, or against the side of a building, or crashing into those yellow, water-filled freeway hazard containers.
Over and over and over and over again, with the infantile glee of 5-year-olds smashing their Hot Wheels cars into bricks.
All while Gyllenhaal’s deranged Danny screams that Cam “better keep that cop alive,” and Will moans that he shouldn’t even be here (ya think?), and Monroe spouts inane, gravity-laced one-liners such as “It’s almost rush hour” and “This is how I operate.”
Oh, yes: At one point, when poor Zach is about to bleed out, Cam must perform emergency surgery while being guided, remotely, by two surgeons who’ve interrupted their golf game.
As a bit of novelty, the final half hour drags in Danny’s Mexican Mafia buddies, led by a grim former colleague (A Martinez, as Papi), who orchestrates an explosive “diversion” that blows up a dozen cop cars in one swell foop.
The icing on the cake: Lorne Balfe’s monotonous, ear-splitting synth score, which could sterilize unsuspecting animals miles away.
I’d call this a tawdry, violent cartoon … but that’d be an insult to cartoons.
That said, there’s no doubt that Bay and Fedak intend much of this to be funny — why else the slobbery dog? — which is even more offensive.
Knowing that $40 million was spent on this testosterone-spewing fiasco is beyond sad; it’s deplorable. And it’s shameful that such lowest-common-denominator gun and crash porn has been manufactured with the specific goal of making money overseas. How proud must Bay and Universal Pictures be, exporting swill that further enhances our international stature as uncivilized, kill-crazy morons?
For reasons that remain inexplicable, Bay and Fedak based this turkey on a similarly dreadful 2005 Danish bomb that at least had the decency to get off the stage after a fast-paced 80 minutes. Naturally, Bay assumed that this earlier film’s sole flaw was its brevity, hence this bloated 136-minute remake.
That, in a nutshell, reveals Michael Bay’s sensibilities.
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