With a Michael Bay film, every dollar tends to go up on screen even on his relatively smaller budgeted films from the $26 million “Pain and Gain” to the $50 million “13 Hours”.
Costing a tight $40 million, Bay’s newest directorial effort “Ambulance” is set to contain all the elaborate action sequences and practical effects you come to expect. However, it seems there are a few digital effects in there he is unhappy with.
A new report in Variety, quoting a promotional interview with European cinema chain Les Cinémas Pathé Gaumont, Bay sang the praises of the practical stunts on the film but got welcomely candid that few moments required digital effects shots with some not turning out as well as he hoped they could be:
“All those explosions and cars flipping, that’s all real. That’s all live, real, ratchets. It looks very dangerous [and] it could be very dangerous if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Most of it is real stunts. There’s very few blue screenshots on the movie. There’s not a lot of CGI. Some of the CGI is s–t in this movie. There’s a couple shots that I wasn’t happy with, okay? Alright.”
Bay may be a perfectionist about a few shots, but so far the critics seem to like the movie with the film chalking up a 78% (6.2/10) on Rotten Tomatoes so far. Empire dubs it “noisy, messy and frequently absurd – yet still somehow his most gleefully entertaining effort in at least a decade.”
The Los Angeles-set film stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a pair of colleagues engaging in a high-stakes bank robbery. Eiza Gonzalez also stars as a paramedic who gets entangled in their off-the-rails operation. The movie opens in cinemas on April 8th.