What’s this all about?
A burned-out paramedic spends three stress-filled nights working on the streets of New York City, and battling his personal demons. Fights are fought. Cars are crashed. Bums are beaten up. Girls are kissed. Heroin is taken. Cigarettes are smoked. Lessons are learned.
Somebody gave Martin Scorsese a budget for a film, and he made one.
Who is Nick in this one?
Nick plays “Frank Pierce,” a world-weary ambulance driver and paramedic who is haunted by memories of patients that he failed to save, while chasing the high of saving others. He tries, and fails, to get fired throughout the film.
He sees the face of a young woman who died of an asthma attack while he treated her everywhere he looks.
He also falls in love with the daughter of a patient, and endures the idiosyncrasies of three different partners.
A big part of the narrative surrounds the fact that Nick hasn’t “saved” anyone in a long time, and he really wants to break his streak. For some reason, the many, many scenes of Nick competently and successfully performing his duties as a paramedic, and delivering numerous patients safely to the hospital apparently don’t count. I don’t get it.
Who else is in this one?
Patricia Arquette (True Romance, Pulp Fiction nope, that was Rosanna) plays “Mary Burke” a mousy heroin-addicted love interest with daddy issues. Man, the Arquettes really had that market sewn up in the 1990’s.
John Goodman (Blues Brothers 2000, Arachnaphobia) plays “Larry,” one of Nick’s ambulance partners. He doesn’t take the job too seriously, dreams of a management job, and plans his evening meals carefully. He’s the “normal” partner, and he plays it well. What else would you expect from John Goodman?
Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction, Radio Shack ads) plays “Marcus,” another of Nick’s partners. He’s over-the-top, making romantic advances at the ambulance dispatchers, performing fake faith healings, and generally taking no shit from anyone. He’s hilarious and charming. He steals every scene that he’s in, and is probably the best character in this movie. And this movie has John Goodman in it.
Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan) plays “Tom Wolls,” another ambulance partner. He’s a lunatic who chases down and beats up bums, gets in physical fights with his patients, and says stuff like, “The streets will run red with blood, tonight.” I’m not sure that Sizemore (or Scorsese) understood how ambulances work.
Marc Anthony (Mr. J-Lo) plays “Noel,” a neighborhood junkie with brain damage. He’s actually pretty OK.
Martin Scorsese (Quiz Show, I guess) puts himself in the film as the voice of a dispatcher. He’d probably tell you that “the City” is also a character in the film.
Did you see that?
Following the classic filmmaking wisdom of “tell, don’t show,” before the film even starts, two lines of white text appear on an all black screen. They read:
This film takes place in New York City
In the early ‘90s
This implies that the director thinks two things. One, that someone will be watching this film in a future so distant that they may not recognize the setting; and two, that the setting, including the section of the decade in which it is set, matters so much to the plot that the audience absolutely needs to understand where and when it is set.
Neither of these things are true.
Scorsese spends most of the film rolling around in images of the hard-knock 90’s like my dog rolls around in rabbit turds that he finds in the yard.
It’s pretentious and stupid. -Michael
I’m going with a “Did you hear that?” instead. At the beginning of the movie when Nick was saving Patricia’s father, he asked her to play her father’s favorite music, because “it helps if you play something he liked”. And what do they go with? Frank Sinatra. I noticed Frank a few times through the movie. I feel like this had to be intentional on Scorsese’s part, but I’m not sure why. Probably, he just really liked Sinatra. -Sarah
What were Nick’s best parts?
I’m going to cheat wildly on the best/worst sections of this review. That’s because Nick’s acting in this one was pretty good across the board. He conveys the harried concern of someone who jumps from one adrenaline hit to another while dealing with dirty, abusive and insane people very well.
Since I can’t just say the best part was “Nick’s acting,” I’ll call out the scene in which Nick works to rescue a heroin dealer who has been impaled on a railing, high above the streets of New York. Nick hates this character, but performs his duties professionally, while engaging with the patient realistically. I found it to be believable and well-delivered. -Michael
Nick does a steady job through this whole film. I’m reminded of his performance in Leaving Las Vegas. He is giving it his all, but the film just doesn’t really tell me a story. That might be the point, but that is neither here nor there where it comes to Nick’s performance. I think the best parts for me were the scenes where Nick is driving the ambulance and they cut from driving scene to driving scene to show the passage of time through the shift. Nick really does a great job doing the same basic thing over and over while somehow adding various emotions and different takes on it. For those bits he kept me entertained on just facial expressions alone. – Sarah
What were Nick’s worst parts?
Throughout the film, Nick provides a narrator voice-over that is presumably meant to give us some insight into his mindset. They are uniformly bad, pretentious, and stupid. I don’t feel like they match the on-screen character at all. And, yes, I realize that Nick didn’t write these, but they are too awful not to mention.
Here’s an example.
- “Saving someone’s life is like falling in love; the best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see. Once, for a few weeks, I couldn’t feel the earth – everything I touched became lighter. Horns played in my shoes. Flowers fell from my pockets. You wonder if you’ve become immortal, as if you’ve saved your own life as well. God has passed through you. Why deny it, that for a moment there – why deny that for a moment there, God was you?”
Is it a drug, or falling in love? You’re mixing your own metaphor.
Here’s another one:
“I washed my face with three kinds of soap, each smelling like a different season. It felt good to be in a woman’s room again, especially a woman who wasn’t comatose or severely disabled. I felt that perhaps I had turned a corner, like I saved someone, though I didn’t know who.”
What?
I feel like these voice-overs are the manifestation of Scorsese thinking, “these stupid audiences aren’t going to get how deep and symbolic I’m being, here. I’d better just tell them.” They aren’t just bad. They are insulting. -Michael
There were a few scenes where Nick was just sitting/standing still and looking empty inside. I’m sure this was the point, but his eyes looked a little too empty inside. He just went to the standard droopy eyes expression he gets when he’s calling it in. He has this look that goes blank, and he used it a lot in this flick. I don’t really like it. You want to be empty in side, go with angst or sorrow, just not so empty that your brain isn’t plugged in. – Sarah
How was the movie?
Martin Scorsese is an excellent film maker who has made a lot of exceptional films. Think of Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Cape Fear. What do they all have in common?
Well, yes, the do all star Robert De Niro, but that’s not what I’m talking about. They all tell a more-or-less traditional three act story that goes somewhere. Also, you’ve likely heard of all of them.
You probably haven’t heard of Bringing Out The Dead. That’s because it isn’t a very good movie. I want to say up front that this is not because of Nicolas Cage’s performance. He’s good. Maybe even excellent.
It’s because there’s no story here. It’s just Scorsese wallowing in hamfisted symbolism (he literally has a white horse walk through a homeless encampment in one scene) and reminiscing about a tough, gritty New York City where the streets were mean, and everybody was tough. That’s a fine setting, but it’s not enough to be a movie all by itself.
I might have had a more favorable view of this two hour chain of nonsense scenes if it had at least been a realistic look at three days in the life of a big city paramedic. I grew up in a household surrounded by EMS workers. My Dad was an EMT/firefighter. His friends were firefighters and paramedics. My friends’ Dads were EMS workers. I grew up hearing wild, sad, and hilarious tales of their adventures doing their jobs and helping the community.
These stories were sometimes scary, sometimes inspiring, often funny, and usually ribald. I feel like Scorsese must have sat down with an ambulance driver one day, heard a couple of his amazing stories, then decided to make a movie. Unfortunately, no one involved in the production seems to have done any actual research into how ambulances work.
We see ambulance drivers who decide which calls to take, frequently go out of service to do non-work-related things, decide when to stop working for the night, park out by the lake for sightseeing, give people rides home from the hospital, and beat up bums. I realize that the experiences of ambulance drivers across time and space vary wildly, but I don’t feel like this movie captures any of them. Mother, Juggs, & Speed is likely a more realistic ambulance film. -Michael
The movie was a bit long and didn’t tell a story. You are just sitting there watching time go by. Some parts were entertaining, but not enough to make it worth it. -Sarah
Yeah, but did you like it?
When he made this, Scorsese probably thought something like, “You know what people love? Gritty tales of the mean streets of NYC! And heroin junkies!” He was wrong.
I hated it. -Michael
Muh. Not really. -Sarah
Where can I watch it?
It’s streaming free on PlutoTV. You know a movie with an A-list director and a star-studded cast is great when you can watch it for free without even signing up for a streaming service.
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