CODE 3 - Mark Reviews Movies

Code 3, Aura Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 11, 2025

Code 3 serves as an example of how a solid premise can be undermined by its execution. The idea of the screenplay by director Christopher Leone and Patrick Pianezza, who worked in emergency medical services, follows a pair of paramedics and a trainee over a 24-hour shift in Los Angeles. It is not a pleasant or particularly rewarding experience for this team, who, among other things, come across several dead bodies, have to try to keep an 11-year-old boy alive after his heart has stopped, have to defend a man having a psychotic episode from being shot by the police, and must dodge traffic at the scene of a car crash to help a severely injured woman and her baby.

This is inherently harrowing stuff, and one of the intriguing notions put forth by the movie is that partners Randy (Rainn Wilson) and Mike (Lil Rel Howery) are so used to the sights, smells, and traumatic experience of seeing dead and dying bodies that they're able to joke about it. Well, they're able to when the movie wants to be funny, which is the biggest issue here. The humor feels forced upon the characters and the narrative, instead of simply trusting these characters to be funny—even under the most extreme of life-and-death scenarios.

The problem, beyond how the humor is handled, is that it's also obvious these men aren't cracking jokes for laughs from an audience. It's purely a coping mechanism, which is made clear in one scene when Randy messes with a random woman who asks him, completely out of the blue, what's the worst thing he has ever seen on the job. He makes a big, dramatic show of finding a dead baby, only to have the entire story conclude with a twisted punch line.

The student, an eager and still optimistic young woman named Jessica (Aimee Carrero), laughs, too, but mainly because she assumes Randy made up the entirety of the story. When she asks if the baby was real, Randy and Mike become instantly silent. Of course, the story was real, but how else could someone go through their day-to-day life, with the constant assurance that yet another horrific thing or two or five will happen each day, without finding some way for those traumatic sights to have some kind of meaning—even if it only is a tasteless joke?

We get these characters, in other words, without the amount of effort that Leone and Pianezza put in to help us understand them and, for whatever reason, to try to make them be funny. Randy's the main character here, and he is fed up with the job, after nearly 19 years working it—when most, as he observes, usually quit after five—and nothing but frustration, financial strain, and terrible memories to show for it.

Randy routinely breaks the fourth wall as he introduces us to his job, the everyday annoyances and obstacles to him doing the work, and those stories of his almost two decades as a paramedic. Those soliloquies don't tell us anything we can't see from or of the character as this long day unfolds, but they definitely have the quality of an especially dark stand-up comedian. The tone of the monologues isn't necessarily wrong, but their insistence to be amusing definitely feels that way.

Leone's direction doesn't help much, mainly because the movie looks a bit too bright, even when night comes and showing the shortcomings of the some of the movie's makeup and practical effects, and cleanly staged to give a sense of the chaos that the nonstop narrative suggests. Randy, Mike, and Jessica go from one health crisis to another—as relatively simple as giving a homeless man with schizophrenia some food to calm him and as complicated as trying not to scare a man who hasn't yet realized that he has a tree branch in his eye out of shock.

They stop when they can for breaks, because there are no scheduled ones on this job for obvious reasons, and have to put up with people who don't appreciate or outright belittle what they do. One doctor (played by Rob Riggle, making the casting of comedic actors seem like an intentional strategy) at a particular emergency room finds paramedic, especially Randy for whatever reason, a general irritation, because it means another patient in a ward already filled with them. Early on, Leone shows the salaries of everyone in that hospital, some of which are five times as much as the minimum wage Randy receives. He makes less than the hospital's head custodian, while part of his job is also cleaning all of the blood, vomit, and whatever else might end up in the back of the ambulance.

The scenes simply depicting the constant physical and psychological stress of this job say far more than any monologues, and the same goes for how and why humor is employed within the context of this work for these characters. Code 3 might have said much more about the experience of being a paramedic by doing a lot less.

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