Michael Bay is one of cinema’s foremost purveyors of spectacle. You don’t necessarily buy a ticket to one of his movies for the intricate plot mechanics or the incredible characters; you go to a Bay movie because you want to see stuff get blown up real good — and for those explosions to look absolutely sensational.
Bay’s latest effort is called Ambulance, and it follows Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a pair of brothers who rob a bank and then take an ambulance hostage, leading authorities on a wild chase through Los Angeles. Sounds like a perfectly agreeable setup for a Bay movie full of incredible stunts and jaw-dropping visuals, right? Right. But according to Bay himself, he may not have entirely delivered the goods in one of those two key categories.
Speaking to Les Cinémas Pathé Gaumont — you can see the video below — Bay was critical of some of Ambulance’s visual effects. “All those explosions and cars flipping, that’s all real,” he said. “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. But most of it is real stunts. There’s very few blue screen shots on the movie. There’s not a lot of CGI. There’s a couple … some of the CGI is s— in this movie. There’s a couple shots that I wasn’t happy with, okay? Alright.”
Well, at least he’s honest. Elsewhere in the interview, Bay notes that they spent just $40 million on Ambulance — a far cry from the massive blockbuster budgets of his Transformers movies. (His last project, Netflix’s 6 Underground, had a reported budget of $150, nearly four times as much.) Clearly, the best visual effects don’t come cheap.
Ambulance is scheduled to open exclusively in theaters on April 8. You can watch Bay’s comments below:
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