Paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is introduced behind the wheel of an ambulance at the beginning of a long three day weekend. He’s already despondent. “I was good at my job. There were periods where my hands moved with a speed and skill beyond me. But in the last year I’d started to lose that control. Things had turned bad. I hadn‘t saved anyone in months. I just needed a few slow nights, followed by a few days off.”

Frank would rather taxi a drunk to the hospital than risk another patient dying on him, but his partner Larry (John Goodman) answers a call for a man who’s not breathing. Frank is unable to revive him, and asks his daughter Mary (Patricia Arquette) if she has any music. With Frank Sinatra playing, Frank finds a pulse. Transporting the patient to Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Hospital, Frank notes that he grew up in this neighborhood, and that for him, it “holds more ghosts per square foot than any other.”

Frank just wants to sleep, but passes his shift shuttling a crazed vagrant (Marc Anthony) from the street to the hospital, and checking in on Mary. He doesn’t get peace Friday night either, partnered with the Jesus crazed Marcus (Ving Rhames). In the film’s best scene, Frank and Marcus are dispatched to a heroin overdose at a club, where Marcus launches into a revival sermon as they bring their patient back to life. Marcus gets so juiced up later in their shift that he crashes the ambulance and flips it over.

Mary’s father is comatose, and Frank follows her to the apartment of a smooth talking dope peddler played by Cliff Curtis, where they both calm their nerves. Frank continues his search for atonement, blaming himself for a street girl who died on him months ago. Come Saturday, Frank shows up late for work and pleads to be fired, but his boss refuses. Instead, he’s partnered with Tom Wolls (Tom Sizemore), a troublemaker who says, “The blood’s gonna run tonight, I can feel it! Our mission: is to save lives!”

Bringing Out The Dead was a 1998 debut novel by Joe Connelly, a paramedic who had worked out of St. Claire’s in midtown Manhattan. Producer Scott Rudin purchased the screen rights and wanted Martin Scorsese to direct it. To adapt the book, Scorsese turned to Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver. The two hadn‘t worked together in over a decade, since a falling out trying to remake The Bad and the Beautiful. But Scorsese felt Schrader was the best at “writing about New York at night.”

Comparisons to Taxi Driver were inevitable. Like the taxi driver, the paramedic drives around at night, “on the cusp of social decay” according to Schrader. Instead of carrying a gun and operating as an angel of death, he performs miracles and saves lives, but as the story progresses, becomes unwound all the same. Pierce isn‘t headed toward violence, but towards peace. The film operates as a sort of stream of consciousness, and polarized critics on its release.

Watching Bringing Out The Dead again, I enjoyed it a lot more than when it played in theaters. The movie has a psychedelic punch – as the ambulance speeds from scene to scene – and dark wit. With director of photography Robert Richardson, Scorsese does a brilliant job capturing the energy on the streets at 4 a.m. Many of the camera set-ups completely blew my mind. The film has anything but a director-for-hire feeling to it. It’s always attacking, and never boring.

By setting the story in the early ’90s, before the New York Fire Department took over the city’s EMS and established a degree of order, the hospital scenes take on an apocalyptic feel, filled with creatures that seem to have crept up from hell. Scorsese dug through his record collection and produced another kick-ass, eclectic soundtrack, including Van Morrison’s blues soaked “T.B. Sheets” over the opening credits, “Nowhere To Run” by Martha and the Vandellas, and R.E.M.’s “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”

When the film moves away from the ambulance, it goes wrong. The characters may have been inspired by real people, but come across feeling like caricatures. For me, it was inferior to Taxi Driver and all of Scorsese’s films with DeNiro because I didn‘t feel any kind of sympathy for Cage’s character. Married to Patricia Arquette at the time, this was their only film together, and they do not develop good chemistry. Their romance feels crammed in. The hyper kinetic scenes on the street are what keep the film interesting.