Baby Driver review

UK filmmaker Edgar Wright has made a name for himself for being able to both satirize and stylistically capture the appeal of whatever genre he’s sending up. “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End” are meant to be entertaining through the use of irony and sarcasm, but when they full-tilt into the world of car-chases, shoot-outs, and robot/zombie attacks, it’s clear that Wright’s love for these genres is not ironic and he would like his posters hanging right next the George Romero and Jon Woo one-sheets, stapled on the walls of a 38 year old’s basement wood paneling.

Wright’s latest film “Baby Driver” sees the director putting his guard down a little by truly throwing himself in the deep end of action-movie waters, without his usual satire and comedy as a flotation device. Where his quick editing and source-music soundtrack selections were once used to enhance a scene’s comedic potential, it is now finely tuned to inform the movie’s intentionally detached style.

Ansel Elgort plays the titular Baby, a young driver who works as a getaway man for a powerful criminal ringleader named Doc (Kevin Spacey). After settling some debt with the crime boss, he is roped into working on one last job before he can drive to the west coast with his new sweetheart Debora (Lilly James.) Baby is forced to work with a Bonny and Clyde couple named Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez) and a loose cannon named Bats (Jamie Foxx). Of course, when plans are thrown out of whack, Baby has to think as quickly as he can drive and maneuver on the road.

The main stylistic theme set in motion from the first scene is Baby’s relationship to the film’s music. The movie is often scored by the music that the character is listening to within each scene as it is unfolding in real time. Here Wright seems to be employing his ironic distance to bring attention to the artifice of filmmaking itself, having the main character enacting his daily life like a director behind the wheel of his own movie. Baby is also an archivist of sorts, as he secretly records every conversation he has and later remixes parts of the raw audio to make danceable midi mix-tapes.

At every turn Wright draws attention to the movie’s movie-ness and, in turn, draws attention to himself as the movie’s stylistic architect.  More so than ever, this director wants to stand alongside this picture as a work of personal gratification. And yet, while it may be the project closest to his ego, dramatically speaking, its show-off quality and its lack of comedic framing renders the film an impressive but somewhat shallow middle-school science fare diorama, in which our eyes dart back and forth to follow the marble as it rattles through the device with precision.

Wright has studied the greats, and “Baby Driver” evokes the bright-eyed zip and tight choreography of the musicals of the 60s, such as “West Side Story,” as well as the work of mentor Quentin Tarantino (particularly, “Reservoir Dogs” and “True Romance”) and the work of Walter Hill (particularly, “The Driver” and the cult crime-musical “Streets of Fire”), but Elgort’s soft, near-wordless performance along with the economically written but stock nature of the screenplay creates for an movie that functions like an entertaining playlist of other movies.  

There’s absolutely a lot of fun to be had in cool-for-cool’s-sake nature of this picture and I don’t begrudge anyone who responds positively to this movie’s tightly considered mechanics. Both Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm turn in stellar scene-chewing performances and this is an achievement in cinematic aesthetics that works as a great popcorn companion. But while the film was perfectly likable I was never unaware of how desperately it wanted to be liked.   

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jul-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Baby Driver."