The Ambulance Never Sleeps

Read Time:5 Minute, 49 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Code 3
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Genre: Action, Comedy, Drama
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 44m
Director(s): Christopher Leone
Writer(s): Patrick Pianezza, Christopher Leone
Cast: Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, Aimee Carrero, Rob Riggle, Yvette Nicole Brown, Page Kennedy
Where to Watch: in select theaters September 12, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: Christopher Leone’s CODE 3 aims for something trickier than a straight “one wild night” rollick: it wants to show the volatility, indignity, and strange tenderness of EMS work without sanding off the splinters. The movie follows Randy (Rainn Wilson), a paramedic who’s done—done with panic attacks, done with a system that bleeds him dry, done with the endless triage of other people’s worst days. He’s training his replacement, Jessica (Aimee Carrero), over a single 24-hour shift, while his partner Mike (Lil Rel Howery) keeps the unit stitched together with wisdom and bone-dry asides. The premise is familiar—one last ride—but the execution is keyed to lived-in specifics, the kind of details you don’t get unless someone has lived that life.

That “someone” is co-writer Patrick Pianezza, a former paramedic whose experience gives the film its spine. The calls from absurd to harrowing in quick cuts: nursing-home goodbyes, drugged-out chaos, the kind of trauma scene that makes an entire street hold its breath. Leone and Pianezza arrange these stops not as a greatest-hits reel of catastrophe but as a tangled life story: the boredom, the banter, the burst of adrenaline, the paperwork, the argument at the hospital doors, the reset, repeat. The repetition is the point—it’s how burnout calcifies—and the movie captures that cycle without losing momentum.

Wilson is the key. He leans into Randy’s brittleness without turning him into a martyr; the performance toggles between sarcasm and something like grief. When Randy’s control vanishes, Wilson lets the meltdown be messy rather than grandiose. That choice pays off because the film doesn’t treat PTSD or moral injury as plot—it’s woven through his reactions to routine disrespect, to hospital politics, to the chasm between what the job asks and what it returns. Opposite him, Howery is the movie’s calibration. He keeps the humor grounded, the partnership believable, the stakes human. Their rapport is the film’s most reliable stride: two pros who’ve learned to talk in shorthand even when they disagree about everything else.

Carrero’s Jessica is written to complicate Randy’s cynicism, and she does—curious, idealistic, and carrying more authority than Randy expects. The way her arc unfolds reframes their dynamic: this isn’t a simple hand-off from a burned-out vet to a bright-eyed rookie. It’s a clash over who gets to define “care” when time, money, and hierarchy squeeze every decision. That tension culminates in a hospital confrontation that plays both as a crowd-pleaser and as a thesis statement about gatekeeping in emergency medicine. Rob Riggle, as a smug foil, is deployed in sharp, concentrated bursts; Yvette Nicole Brown, as Randy’s supervisor, brings pragmatic warmth to the workplace.

Tonally, CODE 3 walks a narrow line—humor inches from heartbreak—and mostly holds it. The comedy comes from pressure valves snapping open: unusual calls, bad timing, the black humor that keeps crews functional. Leone doesn’t indulge in mean-spirited punchlines at the expense of patients; the film is more interested in how responders survive the impossible. When the movie does go big—an elaborate accident set piece, a turbocharged run-and-gun sequence—it maintains an eye-level perspective, so the spectacle never erases the people inside it.

The film favors tight spaces and windshield framing. You feel the “box:” the claustrophobia of the bench seat, the way siren light paints faces in pulses. That emphasis pays off in the quieter stretches, where a handheld drift across exhausted expressions communicates more than any speech about burnout. The sound design also helps: the radio chatter that never quite lets you breathe, the ambient night of a city that demands something every second.

The structure is intentionally cyclical, but the script occasionally returns to the same argumentative note between field and hospital, or between Randy’s resignation and a flicker of conviction, without adding a new dimension. The story hints at bigger institutional critiques—it gestures at pay, policy, and burnout statistics—then largely channels them into personal catharsis.

The authenticity registers. The film understands the distinction between hero worship and genuine respect, and it chooses the latter. It’s respectful of practice without turning into a procedural checklist, and it’s honest about the grind without glamorizing dysfunction. Its best scenes ask a simple question: when the system won’t love you back, what keeps you showing up? Wilson, Howery, and Carrero answer by degrees: habit, loyalty, stubborn hope, the rare call where a life is measurably better because you were there.

As an “elevated action dramedy,” CODE 3 mostly hits. You get sharp, character-driven laughs, a handful of moving sequences, and a humane portrait of work that’s often unseen until the lights arrive. For a film about burnout, it’s unexpectedly energizing—clear about what’s broken, yet open to the idea that purpose can survive inside broken systems. It’s a good ride with a real pulse, and it leaves you looking at the next passing ambulance with a lot more respect.

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