Sometimes I Think 'Ambulance' Is the Best Movie of the 21st Century

A few words about some strange thoughts

Photo: Universal Pictures

A few days ago I was thumbing through the pages of a novel I’m reading, thinking about the qualities that were jumping out at me—or the ones that weren’t, actually. No need to bore you with the title, that’s immaterial. I’ve been reading a lot of mystery novels this year, because back in January I decided that before the year is through, I’m going to write a mystery. As things have taken shape, in truth, I don’t know that I’ll be able to keep that promise to myself, though I always left room for it to be a short story rather than a novel, so who knows, I’ve still got a few months. Either way, reading mystery after mystery—particularly with an eye toward the craft of such storytelling for my own purposes—I’ve become attuned to certain things I like in a good one. Dialogue, for example. The snappy kind. Not just because it’s more fun, but because when the dialogue has rhythm, I find myself pulled along better by the substance of conversation, the details land better, and the plotting of the mystery feels more present.

This book, the one I’m reading, has dialogue I’d describe charitably as leaden. Each back-and-forth between its sleuth and a suspect was a chore to get through, and I found myself losing track of the point. A few chapters in, a plot development occurred that seemed to come entirely out of nowhere, not as a twist, but as expression of character, and flipping back some pages, I discovered that there were whole passages of dialogue that had washed right over me, key setup entirely lost in turgid prose. I’ll finish the book anyway, because the lesser ones can be as instructive to a writer as the greats, and because I’ve been told the actual construction of the mystery—and particularly its solution—is unique and worth experiencing. That interests me, too, the idea that a book can have a good idea, and in some respects execute flawlessly, while still being overcome by deficiencies. There’s excitement in the contradictions, in the lessons they reveal about craft. Spending some decades thinking seriously about art, and narrative art particularly, I increasingly find myself attracted to the frisson of the cracks. Those spaces—gaps, maybe—in a work of art between intention and construction, so often more revealing than either on its own.

Last night, I finished watching an upcoming series that I can’t name either due to a press embargo, but again, it’s not really important (worry not, I’ll discuss it openly at a later date). This series, it actually made me mad. I wondered through much of its running time, why on earth did this creator want to make this show? Even as the show’s third act started clicking into place and I correctly guessed its big twists well ahead of their reveals, I was still unclear what drew its maker, what exactly they thought they were saying. Then the ending arrived, and I understood something that merely guessing at the plot could not have told me: the construction itself was the motivation. That was true, in this case, in the worst way possible. A smug cleverness by which tricky narrative construction is meant to hoodwink the viewer and, rather than satisfy, lord the viewer’s own mistakes over them, like a lesson they’re supposed to have learned by fictitious manipulation.

Angry after having binged through that series, I needed a total change of pace, so I put on Tron: Legacy in 3D. That’s a movie I did not really like on first viewing, but a couple years back I’d gotten high and rewatched it in all its 3D glory, and it all clicked. Well… not all. The early tech de-aging on Jeff Bridges was a mistake at the time, and only looks worse with every passing year. Even my attempts to rationalize the poor, uncanny CGI done for that effect—it’s set in a computer, this is a character who’s literally digital!—fall flat when having to reckon with its use in actual flashbacks. There are other flaws, perhaps, but honestly, they don’t matter. Daft Punk’s incredible score undergirds a film of almost pitch perfect tone, featuring some of the most arresting visuals and action sequences in a film made this century. After a bunch of enjoyably silly IRL preamble, the film moves into the world of Tron. Garrett Hedlund’s Sam Flynn runs out into this strange, neon-lit environment, he's lifted up by an elevator of sorts out into the wider world, and the aspect ratio expands (as it did, I believe, in its IMAX version) and the whole thing feels so majestically overwhelming. This leads into one scene after another of wild vistas, music video oddity, and action digitally abstracted to near Speed Racer levels. When Flynn got on his light cycle, and that insane sequence kicked off, I thought, is this the best movie of the last 20 years?

Tron: Legacy is not the best film of the last 20 years. I’m not stupid, or crazy. But in that instant, I had that thought. A thought so extreme that it seemed to announce itself upon arrival, like it hadn’t even come from my own brain, like someone had thrown grenade in there. And it made me chuckle, because earlier that day, I’d had a very similar, grenade-like thought. I was biking across the city, through the Beaches, listening to a playlist on shuffle, and “Sailing”, by Christopher Cross came on. Never mind it being one of the strangest Record of the Year winners in Grammys history, the song is now firmly associated in my mind with Michael Bay’s 2022 movie Ambulance. Amid that film’s adrenaline rush insanity, Bay leaves space for a relatively sedate moment when the two brothers, played Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, sing along with Cross’s 1980 single.

It actually feels crazy to me that Ambulance only came out two years ago, because it feels like it’s been in my life for years and years, which is perhaps why, hearing “Sailing” again, I had that thought. Is Ambulance the best film of the 21st century? It’s not, but it might be. Bay is not someone many think of as an artist. I’m not sure he thinks of himself that way. He’s got a style, and he’s got he’s preoccupations, and he makes art, so he’s an artist, but there’s a purity of aim in what Bay does that actually feels beyond art in some crucial way. When one of those FPV drone shots careens up and down and sideways around a skyscraper in Ambulance, you feel a rush that exists outside the confines of anything like narrative cinema, though it’s not like it’s Experimental Cinema either. It’s something else. It’s a cinema of the visceral, which sometimes feels to me like the logical endpoint of Hollywood filmmaking. Hence, best movie of the century.

The thought itself is silly and strange, but it seems to exist on the same plane as the thoughts I was having about that mystery novel. Presented with form in narrative, all the component parts are intertwined, inseparable, but separately identifiable. The dialogue from the plotting. The character from the theme. The action from the observation. How they all work together to form a whole is endlessly fascinating to me, including when they don’t quite work. But lately I find myself just as easily carried away by the component parts themselves, when they sing to me. Ambulance has many such component parts, which is why it is genuinely a great movie, but even those drone shots would be enough sometimes, or the personality-filled sparring dialogue between its cop characters, or the absurdity of the plot, or the bit where they sing “Sailing”. I levitate along with those moments and images, and then I think crazy thoughts. Like maybe Ambulance is the best movie of the 21st century. Probably gonna rewatched it tonight.