Quick, if someone asks you to name your favorite Jake Gyllenhaal movies, what are you pulling out? Donnie Darko? The Day After Tomorrow? Zodiac? Those are, without a doubt, excellent choices. But if someone asked me that question, I’d have to go a slightly different route. I’m thinking of movies like Ambulance, Source Code—hell, even the Road House remake. In the course of his nearly 40 years as an actor, Gyllenhaal has racked up over five dozen film and television credits, brought in billions of dollars at the box office, worked alongside some of the world’s best directors, and even scored himself an Academy Award nomination for Brokeback Mountain. He’s established himself as a solid dramatic actor, able to get butts in theater seats (and deliver strong streaming numbers) on name recognition alone. But Jake, if I may skip the formalities, we need you kicking more ass.
I proposed this in a staff Slack thread and was challenged to say it with my chest in public, so here goes: Jake Gyllenhaal is absolutely at his best when he’s channeling his inner Street Fighter. The first time I noticed he had the sauce was in 2011’s Source Code, a movie that’s like Groundhog Day meets Turbulence, but on a moving train. It’s the type of movie you’d catch on TNT 30 minutes in and be locked in ‘til the end, commercial breaks be damned. But for me, Gyllenhaal cemented his status as a capital-A, capital-S “action star” in Ambulance, Michael Bay’s high-octane 2022 action thriller, which finds Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II hijacking the eponymous emergency vehicle and racing through the streets of Los Angeles (don’t forget the film’s title is stylized as AmbuLAnce) after a bank robbery gone wrong. Between firing various assault rifles and screaming lines like “No, not the flamingos!” Gyllenhaal is clearly having the time of his life in this movie. In Ambulance, Gyllenhaal combines the affable charm he brought to Bubble Boy with the knack for mental-breakdown acting he brought to Jarhead, creating a movie that made me glad I ventured out to the theater mid-pandemic.
And Ambulance is only the tip of the iceberg for Gyllenhaal gold. His turn as Spider-Man’s foe Mysterio in the MCU’s 2019 Spider-Man: Far From Home showcased his innate ability to charm his way into everyone’s hearts despite ulterior motives. He was even able to inject his magnetism into the jacked, stoic Dalton from 2019’s Road House remake, which was apparently so good that it’s spawning a sequel. All of this just makes me that much more excited for his upcoming turn as an extraction specialist in Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey, his second time working with the director following The Covenant in 2023. Ritchie and Gyllenhaal just make sense to me. Since The Covenant was based on a true story, it offered a somewhat dialed-down version of Ritchie’s signature style—fast-paced action, witty dialogue, and a charismatic cast of characters. All that looks to be back in full effect for In the Grey, which hits theaters May 15 and dropped a trailer this week.
