Film Round-Up: Ambulance, The Bad Guys and Firestarter
Let’s talk about some movies.
Ambulance
A bank robbery goes wrong, leading to the robbers stealing an ambulance with a paramedic and police officer inside. After the film has done it’s set up and then gets on with the robbery, it’s pretty solid. Ok the characters are all intense badasses with one-liners ready to go and the constant drone camerawork is a bit exhausting, but it’s got a good conceit which started off well. But it just goes down the pan. The film is way too long and is stretching for reasons to keep on going when it’d have been much better if it wrapped up around the 100 minute mark, not when it was well past two hours. Then you realise the characters are all very unlikable, meaning you stop caring about anything that’ll happen because they only speak in badass lines and never feel like actual human beings. Then during a medical operation a guy nuts the man having surgery as he wakes up halfway through as they don’t have anaesthetic, which some how works. That was it for me and proved Ambulance is a disaster of a movie.
The Bad Guys
A notorious gang are forced to go good to get out of a jail sentence. It’s great to see Dreamworks back on form. Firstly, this animated film looks great. A lot of 3D animated movies look the same but this one looks completely different from any other film of its type. The people behind the movie said they were inspired by the Spiderverse movie and it definitely shows as that’s the only film with a similar sort of look. Other than that though, this film is just really fun. You have a bunch of very likable characters doing a family friendly version of a heist movie, with Sam Rockwell doing his best George Clooney impression as the lead, with plenty of entertaining jokes throughout. It’s nothing really revolutionary but considering that Dreamworks have been so weak with new IPs over the last decade, it’s great see there’s still some life in the studio that once brought us Shrek.
Firestarter
A young girl has the power to control fire but must keep it secret or else her and her entire family are at risk. We have seen a lot of films where the premise is basically ‘Superpowers, but in the real world?’ as if the world they are creating is any more realistic than the one Marvel and DC inhabit. And even though we’re as bored as them as we are often are with comic book superhero movies, they still keep making them. Firestarter offers nothing new to this genre. It’s dark, gritty and dull. It hits every beat that these stories tell, from the not being able to control her powers to then managing to do so later. You know, the general boringness you come to expect. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this film, an actual person starting a fire will be remembered more than this film.
