The Ambush review: Peace-time thriller about a rescue mission is thrilling but lacking in voice

Liongsate Play’s Ambush begins with a casual conversation between Emirati soldiers working out with equipment made from rubble and ruin. They discuss football, before one of them quotes Bruce Lee to claim he doesn’t care about who wins at football. It’s a disarming sequence that puts you in the middle of a pressure cooker situation that everyone on the inside is pretending is anything but. Life is always about winning or losing, even the mundane or the municipal, but to men on the front wearing and braving bullets, it’s much more than that. Maybe that is why they some of them avoid the competitiveness, the tendency of some to turn war into some sort of numerical sport. The Ambush is a decent peace-time thriller that doesn’t have much to say about the philosophy of war, other than the fact, that once the bullets start flying, there might be precious little to hold onto.

A UAE contingent is providing aid in an unnamed country. On their last watch, Ali, Bilal and Hindasi are looking forward to returning home after one last hurrah of hopefully little note. Not all is rosy between the three, but when it comes to the job, everyone is expected to pull in their noses. The three leave on a customary patrol, and are unexpectedly ambushed by local militants. Back at the base, the commander is notified of the incident and decides to operate an unlikely rescue mission. Hence begins the game, not exactly of cat and mouse, but of sitting duck and shooting gun. The Emirati forces are cornered from all sides, the three soldiers disconnected from the rest, and the odds are stacked against the incumbent. Only dumb luck can get people out of such a sticky situation.

The Ambush, though, makes the point that beyond luck there is also human perseverance, the elegance simply to power through similarly sticky situations and the strength that comes from feeding off of each other’s sense of purpose. Directed by Pierre Morel, the Ambush is realistic to look at and explosive in equal measure. It performs its explosive bits to perfection, and is in fact impressive in scale and authenticity. It’s always tricky to qualify war films from the sexiness of its action, but here, there is no spillage of blood or oversubscription of gore to justify the intensity of the film. The direction, inspired possibly by Paul Greengrass’ messy, hectic style seamlessly overlaps with a more literary sense of action. There are close ups, long shots, overheard markers and some typical genre specifying shots as well. In one scene an exploding vehicle does nothing to deter the commander who nonchalantly turns and sits inside his vehicle.

As for the stories of the three protagonists at the heart of this film, there isn’t much to say except that they play the part of narrative hooks. The Ambush is seemingly based on a true story and to create something absorbing creative leverage has been taken to transform pedantic soldier lives into frictional, often tenacious human beings who have a bone to pick with each other. One of the things the film has going for it is its lack of exposure, or that of the skin so to speak. Explosions and bullets enter the body at odd angles and enclosed spaces here, but the camera rarely uses that as a moment to serve some sort of perverse nightmare. The film takes the high road of choosing not to gratify your anticipation with the view of nerves and tissues jangling out of torsos. In one scene, an explosion seems to pierce the side of a small truck through the legs of one of our protagonists. But even though he is being rescued, the film spares us the detailed horror of his injuries. The story remains the story, and doesn’t descend into violent farce.

The Ambush, though it is smartly made and well-directed doesn’t have a lot that is new to say about conflict and war that hasn’t already been said. It has murmurings of a Black Hawk Down, the textural simplicity of a Zero Dark Thirty but not quite the momentum or clarity of vision to really be what it set out to be. Sometimes The Ambush can feel like action flick pretending to also be a comment on war, and sometimes it can feel like a memoir, painfully dragging itself through action sequences with no sense of pathos other than a couple of back-stories and some family photos to hang onto. The point is that The Ambush is admirable for its technical accomplishments, its realism and smartly orchestrated scale, but it has precious little to say that will also make it memorable. 

The author writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Views expressed are personal.

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