Sirens screaming and lights flashing, a New York City ambulance speeds through the night. Its drivers are paramedics working the graveyard shift — men who come face-to-face with the dead and the dying on a daily basis. Burnt out from one too many nights on the job, they are nearly as broken as the bodies they haul through the streets. What keeps them going is their caustic sense of comedy, and an acrid view of a world which seems to have its surreal epicenter in Manhattan.
Nicolas Cage plays EMS paramedic Frank Pierce. It is the early 1990’s and New York has not yet undergone its renaissance of recent years. Surrounded by the injured and the dying, Frank is dwelling in an urban night-world, crumbling under the accumulated weight of too many years of saving and losing lives. The film follows Frank over the course of fifty-six hours in his life – two days and three nights on the job – as he reaches the very brink of spiritual collapse and redemption.
