Top Five Action Movie Scenes and the Madness of Michael Bay’s ‘Ambulance’

Ambulance 2022

Bay's 15th film and, per the hosts, his official return to form after a decade mostly spent on Transformers sequels. Two adoptive brothers turned bank robbers (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal) hijack an ambulance and take an EMT (Eiza Gonzalez) and a wounded cop hostage for a roughly 90-minute chase across Los Angeles. Both hosts call it the best chase movie since Fury Road, praise the drone photography and Lorne Balfe's score, and rate it a strong theatrical recommendation despite a thin script and an overstuffed back half of characters.

6 Underground 2019

Netflix action film the hosts saw theatrically and loved as a bracing, hilarious spy adventure; most people watching at home thought it was noisy bullshit.

Transformers 2007

Sean still defends the first one as a worthwhile CGI experiment, before Bay spent several more years and four sequels on the franchise.

The Rock 1996

Cited with Bad Boys as proof Bay's real strength is smaller, urban-set thrillers rather than franchise spectacle. Ambulance gives a supporting character the same name, Willy Sharpe, as William Fichtner's here, and has characters mistake the movie for the actor it's also named after.

Bad Boys 1995

Bad Boys II 2003

Armageddon 1998

Chris says Ambulance has an 'engine,' meaning a propulsive plot device, that Bay's films have mostly lacked since this one.

Pain & Gain 2013

Where Bay first worked with Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. 'The Rock.'

Heat 1995

One of three L.A. crime movies, along with Collateral and Training Day, that Ambulance overtly references.

Collateral 2004

Training Day 2001

Tenet 2020

Sean reads Ambulance's tighter, more legible chase geography as Bay's response to Tenet's.

Speed 1994

Chris's comparison for the movie's disregard for practical logistics: the ambulance's gas tank never runs low.

End of Watch 2012

Sean's demarcation point for Gyllenhaal deciding to take the safety off as an actor; also an L.A.-set movie largely shot inside cars, like Ambulance.

Nightcrawler 2014

Prisoners 2013

Enemy 2013

Southpaw 2015

Nocturnal Animals 2016

Okja 2017

Stronger 2017

The Boston Marathon bombing drama neither host could name off the top of his head.

Wildlife 2018

Velvet Buzzsaw 2019

Spider-Man: Far From Home 2019

Where Gyllenhaal played Mysterio.

The Guilty 2021

Wedding Crashers 2005

Kier O'Donnell, who plays an FBI agent in Ambulance, is instantly recognizable to the hosts as the younger Cleary brother obsessed with Vince Vaughn's character here, one of the episode's favorite pieces of stunt casting.

The Dark Knight 2008

No. 1: the Joker's prisoner-transfer truck flip. Chris's pick for the purest distillation of what makes an action sequence work: real stakes, a plan that shouldn't work, and a stunt that still looks inexplicable to him.

Mad Max: Fury Road 2015

No. 2: a two-for-one 'cheat' pick, paired with the tanker-assault chase from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Chris rates George Miller among the great car-chase directors, alongside Peckinpah and Frankenheimer.

Aliens 1986

No. 3: the Marines' first encounter with the hive. Picked for sound and tension rather than spectacle: an action sequence that goes right up to the edge of action.

The Raid 2 2014

No. 4: the prison-riot sequence, which Chris calls maybe the most violent thing on either list.

Hard Boiled 1992

No. 5: John Woo's hospital-hallway shootout, which Chris calls a summation of every shootout before it and a preview of John Wick and The Matrix after.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 2003

No. 1: the Bride vs. the Crazy 88s, a 35-minute sequence Sean calls his cheat pick because of its length. Loaded with homage: Bruce Lee's yellow tracksuit, Shaw Brothers wire work, Gordon Liu as one of the 88s.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day 1991

No. 2: the T-1000's LA River Basin truck chase. Sean's pick for the moment 1990s action iconography actually begins, and the template for a generation of homages and parodies.

Jurassic Park 1993

No. 3: the T. rex's escape. Cited for blending practical Stan Winston creature work with CGI so well it still holds up 30 years later.

Oldboy 2003

No. 4: the single-take hammer-hallway fight. Chosen for choreography so precise it plays as documentary rather than staged action.

Mission: Impossible 1996

No. 5: the Langley computer-hacking break-in. A De Palma sequence Sean picked for pure tension with no guns involved, capped by Tom Cruise suspended over the vault floor.

The Matrix 1999

Left off both lists only for having too many candidate scenes; Sean's favorite is the lobby shootout.

Die Hard 1988

Possibly the best action movie ever made, but neither host could isolate one signature sequence from the whole.

The Enforcer 1976

A good Eastwood Dirty Harry entry, but Sean says its shootouts don't hold up next to Heat's.

Saving Private Ryan 1998

The Omaha Beach opening, set aside along with other large-scale battle sequences as 'kind of cheating' since so much of that scale leans on VFX.

Gladiator 2000

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 2002

The Battle of Helm's Deep, grouped with the other battle sequences left off both lists.

Black Hawk Down 2001

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 1999

Chris's answer for a Star Wars pick: the Duel of the Fates lightsaber duel, from a movie he agrees isn't very good.

Return of the Jedi 1983

Sean's answer: the prison-barge escape.

Solo: A Star Wars Story 2018

Chris's actual favorite Star Wars action beat: the train robbery that reveals Lando's backstory.

Children of Men 2006

The opening car-ambush sequence, another one that felt 'a little odd' to include but got a mention anyway.

Captain Phillips 2013

Apocalypse Now 1979

The Ride of the Valkyries helicopter assault, raised near the end as an obvious omission.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 2006

Chris's favorite entry in a franchise he's otherwise seen exactly one movie of.