'Code 3' sounds the alarm on plight of EMTs
Rainn Wilson and Lil Rel Howery careen between comedy and drama
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If you think a movie about paramedics starring Rainn Wilson and Lil Rel Howery would be a comedy, you would be right – up to a point.
“Code 3” is darkly funny at times, finding laughs in the black humor of two men who have absolutely seen it all rushing from one emergency to the next. “I hope this patient is dead,” Wilson’s Randy grumbles as they respond to a call, “so I can eat.”
But “Code 3” is also a blistering drama that doesn’t shy away from the emotional toll that being an EMT – overworked, underpaid, and with a front-row seat to the city’s worst tragedies – has on people like Randy. Patrick Pianezza, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Christopher Leone, was a trained EMT, and the film is packed with authentic details – some horrifying, some funny, all fascinating – that convince you that this film knows what it’s talking about.
The whipsawing from comedy to tragedy and back again leads to somewhat of an uneven tone for “Code 3.” But not necessarily in a bad way. Like the paramedics, we have no idea what the next call will bring – a funny anecdote or a painful trauma – and that uncertainty creates a special kind of tension watching the movie.
We’re told many EMTs don’t make it past a year in the job, and most don’t make it to five. Randy has been in an ambulance for over 18 years, and doesn’t look like he’s had a decent night’s sleep for any of them. Rumpled and unshaven, with haunted eyes, Wilson turns out to be a very good choice to play the strung-out Randy, digging into the bitter, angry monologues the screenplay gives him.
But just when Randy convinces us that he’s past the point of caring whether his patients live or die, the film gives us a little window into his wounded psyche, like an offhand moment when he straighten out the family photos on the dresser of an elderly woman who has just died.
Randy has finally decided to leave his job for a normal life in an insurance office, and “Code 3” follows his last 24-hour shift with his longtime partner Mike (Howery) and a new recruit, Jessica (Aimee Carrero). The “Training Day”-style structure allows room for lots of darkly funny banter between Wilson and Howery, and lots of trenchant details about life as a paramedic – how they approach a scene (no running), how they deal with cops and doctors, and how they never, ever reassure a patient that they’re going to live. We also learn how little EMTs actually make – in one sequence, the camera roams over an emergency room, telling us the annual salary of each employee in descending order. The paramedics come in just below the head custodian.
There’s not much of a narrative binding these episodes together, but “Code 3” is compulsively watchable as it barrels from one crisis to the next. Wilson and Howery get the chance to show the full range of what they can do as actors, from comedic to dramatic, and the strong supporting cast includes Rob Riggle as an arrogant doctor and Yvette Nicole Brown (“Community”) as the paramedics’ salty supervisor.
I do have a couple of complaints. One is the film’s depiction of mentally ill patients as colorful oddballs who believe that they’re the President or Satan. For a movie so in tune with so many other aspects of our broken health care system, it feels like a retrograde caricature out of a movie from the ‘70s or ‘80s.
The other is the film’s penchant to let Randy break the fourth wall and talk to the audience directly. I could see this working once, perhaps at the very beginning of the movie, but its repeated use threatens to turn “Code 3” into a video essay rather than a movie. (It also draws inevitable comparisons to Wilson’s most famous talk-to-the-camera role as Dwight on “The Office.”)
Aside from that, “Code 3” is an engaging dark comedy that shines a red-and-blue light on the important and often unsung work that EMTs do.
“Code 3” is now in theaters. In Madison, it’s playing at AMC Fitchburg 18.