Ambulance Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

Downs...

4. The Exhaustingly Overlong Runtime

Though the Danish film it's based on clocks in at a svelte 80 minutes, Bay's version unsurprisingly runs for almost an entire hour longer at 136 minutes.

While this isn't nearly the longest film in Bay's filmography, it is abundantly clear that the efficient original story has been expanded and stretched close to snapping point.

The first act is where the padding is most blatantly felt, because while the 2005 original takes mere minutes for its sibling bank robber protagonists to hijack the titular vehicle, here audiences are left waiting until almost the end of the first act.

Bay's bloats things out considerably with melodramatic establishing scenes that ultimately don't add enough to the story to really justify their inclusion.

It's also fair to say that some of the periodic lulls between the frantic set-pieces could probably have been trimmed down a little. Get this down to a tight two hours and it'd feel like even more like an unstoppable action juggernaut.