Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) returns home from the war to discover his wife is in desperate need of experimental cancer treatments. Of course, the insurance won’t cover it, so he turns to his brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) for help. Naturally, his brother ropes him into pulling a bank heist for a big payday. If you already couldn’t guess, things go south quick, and the brothers are forced to make their getaway in an ambulance with a feisty EMT (Eiza Gonzalez) and a wounded cop in tow. Almost immediately, every cop in the city is after them, and it’s up to the brothers to do some fancy driving in order to keep out of the big house.
I normally associate director Michael Bay with shaky-cam action sequences, rapid-fire editing, and big, swooping camera shots. His movies were bad enough with all this stuff, but now, they have somehow gotten worse. The reason? Someone got the bright idea to give Mikey Boy a drone for Christmas. Now, he’s mounting a camera to it and flying it around God’s creation during the action sequences. That means more whooshing and swooshing, sometimes to nauseating effect. (Especially during the pointless shots where the camera goes up and down buildings, Spider-Man-style.) OK, there is one admittedly cool shot where the camera flies under a car while it’s in mid-air, but the rest of the flying camera shenanigans are just plain annoying.
The bank heist scenes are decent too. It’s just that the action becomes overly chaotic once the brothers hop into the titular automobile. Some of time it’s hard to tell who’s shooting at who during the gunfights and who’s chasing who during the chase scenes. I mean, I assume the robbers are shooting at the cops and the cops are chasing after the robbers, but it sure would’ve been nice to see it in a coherent manner.
Gyllenhaal has a couple of good moments. Whenever I was about to mentally throw in the towel, he would chew the scenery or rock out to Christopher Cross. That at least kept me going, as I wanted to see what he’d do next. The rest of the cast, unfortunately, aren’t very memorable.
Car chase movies are hard to screw up. I mean, I even kind of like Smokey and the Bandit 3. You’d think this kind of scenario would be right up Bay’s alley. I guess he was too busy fucking around with his drone and namechecking his previous movies (having someone quote Sean Connery in The Rock is what passes for “Meta” in a Bay flick) to deliver the goods.
strongly disagree on Bay's movies, they are all pretty damn good and this is no exception.
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