Fun and furious, Baby Driver is the summer's best film so far.
Baby Driver
Grade: A-
Director: Edger Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End)
Screenplay: Wright
Cast: Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars), Jon Hamm (The Town)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 53 min
by John DeSando
“Now I don't think I need to give you the speech about what would happen if you say no, how I could break your legs and kill everyone you love because you already know that, don't you.” Doc (Kevin Spacey)
If you like your romantic heists with bite, such as above and as in Quentin Tarantino’s films, Edgar Wright (Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy) has raised the style bar because Baby Driver is a major hoot as well as a solidly violent thriller. It’s as if Tarantino took Tony Scott’s True Romance and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and married them to his own Reservoir Dogs.
It’s all silly but so amusing as to be almost real. For those of us who love wise cracking and wise guys, Baby Driver is fully satisfactory: “Don’t feed me any more lines from ‘Monsters Inc.’! It pisses me off!”
Baby (Ansel Elgort) drives for heists to pay off a debt to Doc, a king pin planning robberies. Meeting a lovely waitress, childlike almost like himself, Debora (Lily James), Baby wants out of the driving business, but that’s not easy. Doc has plans for his good luck charm, Baby.
While things do get violent, with not much actual blood, it’s the minimal-CGI driving of which Steve McQueen would fully approve and Drive’s Ryan Gosling could only envy. Dick Pope’s cinematography and the stunt driving magicians let you feel a part of the entertaining spins, flips, and reverses in an adrenaline rush usually reserved just for the drivers. Baby is a first-rate, formula-like driver with a stoic mien that drives even the seasoned hoods crazy.
The film can rightly be called a car chase musical or a heist film cum romance. From Bellbottoms by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Tequila by the Button Down Brass and Brighton Rock by Queen to Nowhere to Hide by Martha and the Vandellas, the soundtrack is rockin’ with dozens of oldies and goodies just right for plot and for keeping things, violent as they are, light.
Baby moves to the beats of the music only he hears—with a good tune coming out of his ear plugs, he’s the best driver of any heist you have ever seen. His cache of at least 5 iPods for music is enviable.
“A car film driven by music.” Edgar Wright
Baby Driver is one of the best films of the year.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
