CODE 3 Review

It is sometimes very hard to choose a movie to watch.

I have so many streaming services and so varied a taste and so many classic films I still haven't seen. I often think something along the lines of "Okay, it's time to watch a movie", but it will be forty minutes later before I choose anything.

I open Prime, for example, and I scroll through their Most Recent Additions, and I scroll through their Most Popular, and I scroll through their various categories. I pick one or two Maybe options--you know, for if I don't come across anything better--and then I open Hulu and do the same there. Then Peacock. Paramount Plus, AMC Plus, Netflix, Tubi.

It's a LOT of scrolling.

I thought I had it today. I was going to watch Let The Right One In on Tubi. But then I realized I was watching something with my wife and not by myself, and if it had subtitles, that would interfere with her inevitable phone play. So I decided I should choose something in English. Back to scrolling I went!

I relatively quickly found Code 3 on Hulu. A silly looking outing starring Dwight Schrute and the funny guy from Get Out! If there was anything we could watch while also paying attention to our phones, this was it!

Code 3 is the story of a long-suffering paramedic, Randy, and his partner, Mike, who are out for their typical 24 hour shift. The only difference is that they are being shadowed by a new recruit, Jessica. Randy is put in the position of having to not only do his job, but explain it, as well.

The night is full of the usual kind of action that paramedics see. But will it be the night that finally breaks Randy's spirit?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Wow, this was far better than I expected when I turned it on on a whim. It balances humor and heart and even some light action all extremely well. I mean... very light action. This is classified as an Action-Comedy, and I don't see that at all. It's definitely more in line with being a Dramedy. I think it was marketed and described the way it was to get more eyes on it. And if that works, great! But it is in no reality an Action-Comedy.

Regardless of what I call it or what it calls itself, Code 3 is an exceptional film that balances differing tones pretty damn well. When you cast Rainn Wilson, Lil Rey Howery. and Rob Riggle, you are clearly going or laughs, but Code 3 ends up being a movie with real weight to it. I don't believe Rob Riggle in particular gets any humorous dialogue at all. And the movie made my wife cry (she and I cry at very different films)!

+ Rainn Wilson gives a wonderful performance as the burnt out paramedic trying to do his job while mentoring a young woman coming into the field. He is sympathetic and very believable. I never thought of Dwight Schrute while watching this, and that is the number one goal for any famous television actor hopping into a movie role: to disappear into it and not have the audience thinking of them as their previous beloved character.

Rainn--who is a very young looking SIXTY YEARS OLD I found out while watching this--shows real acting chops here outside of his well-known comedic timing. I can't say for sure that he shadowed some real EMS workers in preparation for the role, but he plays it well enough that it certainly feels like he did. There is a level of realism to every move he makes and every mood he plays, and I was all the way in on him as Randy the paramedic.

- There are intermittent bits of Randy breaking the fourth wall that are a bit unnecessary and took me a little out of the movie. Though one or two are very powerful moments, so where might the movie be without them? It's hard to say they are a relevant negative, honestly, but I was having a genuinely hard time trying to fish for something about this movie to pick on.

Maybe we just needed MORE of the fourth wall breaks because they are infrequent enough that when one would kick in, it would take me aback for a moment before I would think "Oh, they are doing another one of these". With how infrequent they are, they just feel a bit too spaced apart.

- The movie continually hints at a very different ending than the one we get. I wonder how different it might be if we got that conclusion. I don't want to get into spoiler territory so I won't say much more, but my wife and I were talking throughout the third act about what the ending was definitely going to be and how they might pull it off. And then they just... don't do that. Which... again... when is subverting my expectations a bad thing? But it did leave me wondering which resolution might have been the superior choice.

Wow, I was really floored by this effort, which I thought was going to be far too goofy and not really worth my time. But Code 3 lets you know pretty early on exactly what kind of movie you are about to get, and it follows through well on that. If you've seen the meme of a guy going from sitting back in his chair to leaning forward in it? That was actually and honestly me for this one. I was thoroughly engrossed, and if I had seen this in 2025, it would easily have made me top 20 films of the year. As it is, unless 2026 ends up blowing me away with what I choose to watch, look for this in my Best Films I Saw For The First Time In 2026 articles next year!

🍿 SCORE = 86 / 100