Movies

Watch: Michael Bay Shares An Explosive Stunt Video From His Latest Movie, 'Ambulance'

Michael Bay Stunt Video
By Ben Pearson

The King of Explosions is back, baby – but if he's not careful, his overwhelming desire to blow stuff up real good might literally be the death of him.

Michael Bay, the director of honest-to-God action classics like The Rock and, uh, anti-classics like Transformers: Age of Extinction, is currently hard at work making a new thriller called Ambulance, which is filming in Los Angeles. Bay is a natural born showman, and he's shared a new behind-the-scenes video of an explosive stunt on the set of his new movie which looks insanely dangerous, but which Bay promises was "controlled." Check it out below.

Michael Bay Stunt Video

Bay shared this video on his Instagram page, and he wrote the following caption to go with it:

Filming my new movie. I'm the guy in black on the dolly. We do these controlled but dangerous looking shots. It takes a great crew to make these shots possible. Knowing the physics involved and catch cars. At the end, everyone was safe. This phone video makes it look scarier than it was in person.

Here's the thing: it's probably easy for folks to read that caption, watch the video clip again, and say, "You know what, Michael Bay? I think you're full of s***, because that doesn't look safe to me." But Bay has built his entire career on capturing stunts like these, so I absolutely believe that he and his team had a pretty damn good idea of how this was going to play out. There's always room for error, though – and I find it hard to believe that everyone knew that ambulance was going to literally bump the dolly on its tracks. That camera equipment is expensive as hell, and to see that rig shaking while Bay and his dolly grip have to jump away from the wreckage makes it seem like they're really dancing on the knife's edge. They probably cut this one a bit closer than anticipated, despite Bay's defensive tone.

The bigger issue is whether it's worth endangering the crew's lives to achieve a shot like this, and some people – I imagine Bay among them – would say that yes, it's absolutely worth it, because this crew knows what it's signed up for. That doesn't explain a previous case of a non-stunt performer being injured on the set of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but one hopes that an incident like that only inspired Bay to tighten things up even more when it comes to stunt safety.

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