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Watching a Michael Bay movie is like going to a dinner party where the only things served are steak, fried chicken, pork chops, and pizza. No appetizers, no sides — just one greasy entrée after another with nothing to break it up besides sips of lukewarm beer. Because you know your host worked hard to put this all together, you politely eat as much as you can. But once it hits you just how stuffed you are, you come to regret the indulgence. Though exceptions exist — 1996’s The Rock, helped by indelible work from Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery, goes down easy, for instance — you can expect nearly 30 years after his debut that when Bay hands you one of his overfilled plates, you won’t reach the last bite contented. Instead you’re overcome with relief that you’re free now to be anywhere else, doing anything else. 

Still, I looked forward to the scaled-back (for Bay) Ambulance in spite of the misery he’s put me through. I think that’s because Bay’s movies, noisy and prismatically obnoxious as they can be, have incredibly become fortuitously fresh in contrast to the superhero movies and chintzy reboots now dominating notions of the modern action blockbuster. All guided by a fundamental desire to blow stuff up, Bay’s films by and large have a rough-textured tangibility when his closest counterparts these days are unpersuasive green screen ads. Blood- and sweat-slick bodies really do appear overexerted in battle. Bay’s epic, practical effects-preferring action sequences truly feel pained over. And even if his worldview wavers from adolescently hypermasculinized to almost always outrageously celebratory of the cultural hegemony, Bay’s overall work in the action genre at least feels made by a person — if one with whom I’d never want to be in the same room — freeing his fixations and not someone conspicuously trying above most else to appease the corporation under which they’re working and the ever-expanding multiverse to which they’re contributing.

Read the full review on 425.