Code 3 Review: Urgent care, decent comedy

Rainn Wilson stars as a jaded paramedic who could use a day off and a burger.

Exhaustion, duty, kindness, and projectile vomiting collide in Code 3, the second feature from director and co-writer Christopher Leone, who teams with paramedic and first-time screenwriter Patrick Pianezza for an anxious, earnest dramedy that rides a blurry line between Bringing Out the Dead and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Rainn Wilson plays Randy, a jaded, sad sack EMT whose last reserves of obligation to his job have worn down to a tiny, tender nub. "We are your best friend on your worst day," he narrates, his nervy glare shimmering with both resentment and exhaustion. A few scenes later, he hopes out loud that his next call is DOA so he can get a burger. For someone who's actively quiet quitting, Randy sure makes quite the racket.

It's a tough job, and the Leone/Pianezza team knows it. Paramedics sit at the bottom of the medical care pyramid, and it sucks there: lousy salary, zero appreciation, hostile ER doctors (embodied here by a dementedly grim Rob Riggle), and the constant peril of running headlong into catastrophe. One particularly appalling night — Randy gets stuck with a dirty hypodermic — causes his student ride-along bolting for another career (bathed in barf, no less). Convalescing on a chemo and ice cream diet, he realizes he's burned out. "I need the hell out of EMS, before I fuck up and kill somebody," Randy blurts out during a job interview. The rate at which his heart is always racing at work, that is sound advice.

Randy'd make a clean break of it if the gravity well of the broken medical system didn't keep pulling him back. His latest shift: a twenty-four-hour run with driver Mike (a side-splitting Lil Rel Howery) and new rookie ride-along, Jessica (Aimee Carrero). From here, the movie settles into a bumpy but consistently amusing workaday hangout situation, where, between calls, differing philosophies of medical care collide. Jessica says EMTs can and always should aspire to do better. Randy: "We're not heroes... You clock in, you clock out." Mike sums up this apathetic take more cogently, and not without a tinge of experiential sadness: "Caring is what kills you."

Despite moody Randy, the movie is at its most boisterous in the first act. That lively tone, paradoxically, downshifts almost immediately following the news that he has, improbably, aced that interview, and can finally quit his 13-year paramedic odyssey. "I didn't know I could still feel happy!" he squeals. There's a spring in Randy's step for the remaining hours of his shift, where, naturally, his talents and affected cynicism are tested.

It's here where I note that Code 3 is a smidge longer than it needs to be, and does things that make it feel even longer. Leone throws in a literal ticking clock, ostensibly a countdown to the discovery that Randy — gasp! — actually loves his job and finds value in life by doing it. I could avoid telling you about this, but come on: a comedy with this premise is, above all else, a test of vocation, and its results are all but preordained. You'll grok the ending well before Randy drops his not insincere farewell to his beleaguered supervisor, Shanice (a wonderful Yvette Nicole Brown).

In the meantime, Leone attempts and mostly succeeds in striking an agreeable hangout rhythm, though his and Pianezza's rambling, overwritten screenplay can sometimes bend the film's otherwise well-performed scenes of social observation and comedic riffing past the point of breaking. Code 3 could have employed a sharper editor's scalpel to hone this into a tighter, breezier shape: Randy's audience asides, the en route riffs that stretch a beat too long, one sequence that pulls directly from Spike Lee's The 25th Hour but fumbles its agitated effect, should have been cast to the floor. This padding doesn't sink the film, but its comic torque loses oomph more often than it should.

Still, there's much to enjoy during this ambulance ride: Randy's testy stand-offs with Riggle's ER doc; a negligent nursing home covering their ass by calling 911 on a dead patient; the grotesque recounting of the worst things Randy's ever seen to a drunk at a diner — these digressions accumulate into a feeling of lived experience. Wilson, Howery, and Carrero are fundamentally great, strengthening the weaker parts with genuine bursts of late-night irritation, gallows humor, and moments of sweetness that offset the film's few instances of schlock comedy which its marketing will almost certainly oversell.

Despite the bodily fluids, projectile gags, and the occasional flash of buckshot, Code 3 is ultimately a thoughtful medical procedural that regards its subject with more respect than irony. Leone uses all these funnies to make room for empathy, and when his film acknowledges the human toll of a broken system, it finds something, if not entirely revelatory, then certainly moving. Those tonal shifts are sudden, but they at least reflect the alternating states of crisis and calm, laughter and despair, that define the job. The real strength of Code 3 lies in the tired, underpaid, underappreciated individuals who show up day after day to save strangers. Leone, Wilson, and the rest give them their due.

6 / 10

Code 3 hits theaters on September 12.

Directed by Christopher Leone.
Written by Patrick Pianezza and Christopher Leone.
Starring Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, Aimee Carrero, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Rob Riggle.

104 mins. / Rated R. A stick ends up in an unfortunate place.