Baby Driver - Review Thread

Not really a complaint but...

Baby Driver(7/1/2017)

I remember when I got my first mp3 player. I was in high school, probably either a junior or a senior and I was late to the Ipod party but I had already been collecting song files for a while at that point through various less than legal sources like Limewire and Kazaa. Rather than actually get an actual mp3 player when I was on the go I’d burn albums onto CD-Rs and carry a binder of these burned CDs around in my backpack and listen to them on a red Sony discman that would periodically skip if I bumped it around too much. It was an astonishingly annoying way to listen to music but that didn’t occur to me until I finally got a 5th Generation iPod (the first model that also played video) and quickly began to wonder how I ever lived without it. A few years later I gave that iPod to my father who traded me for the 80gb model that he bought without actually needing the extra space and I still have and regularly use that 80gb 5th generation iPod to this day. I’ve never upgraded to the iPod touch because until recently they didn’t have the space capacity for my 12,000+ song music collection and even now they are making higher capacity touches I’m reluctant to switch to them as I enjoy the simplicity of a device with actual buttons and since my decade old iPod still hasn’t broken I don’t need to worry about replacing it. Anyway, I bring this up because the new Edgar Wright film Baby Driver is, among other things, a celebration of music and the way we listen to it when on the move and it’s medium of choice is the same Apple product that revolutionized 2005 me’s various bus rides.

Baby Driver is set in contemporary Atlanta and follows a baby-faced young man who goes by the name Baby (Ansel Elgort). Baby seems to be about eighteen and looks like he’s barely old enough to have a driver’s license and yet seems capable of driving with the speed and precision of Dominic Toretto, The Transporter, and The Driver from Drive all wrapped into one. This skill seems to have been the result of an almost autistic drive to become a master after experiencing a traumatic car crash as a child and this has also led him to some other strange mannerisms. He’s a very quiet person with a compulsion to record conversations he has and more importantly seems to be wearing earbuds and listening to music at almost all times. This mix of skills have led him to be a rather unlikely getaway drivers for robbery crews and he’s currently doing this to pay off a debt to a mysterious heist planner named Doc (Kevin Spacey) who claims that Baby is only a few more jobs away from being square with him, but it quickly begins to look likely that he’s not going to let Baby get away so easily and given that Baby has recently met a young waitress named Debora (Lily James) that he’s thinking about running away with whether Doc wants him to or not.

The first thing you’ll notice about Baby Driver is that the thing has wall to wall music in the background. There’s a very wide mix of popular music on the soundtrack from various decades and genres. It will happily transition from The Damned to The Commodores to Beck to Young MC and more often than not it goes for the deep cuts from these artists rather than the super recognizable songs you might expect (though there are a few of those too). At times it feels a little bit like Edgar Wright is just trying to show off how deep his knowledge of semi-obscure music runs, but he is at times able to capture what the experience of listening to pop music is like and how it can tap into your feelings and how you can use it to relate to others. If Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was about what being a little too obsessed with videogames does to your mind Baby Driver is about what being a little too into music does to you. What’s more Wright is able to use this music to choreograph both the action scenes and some of the quieter moments where Baby is just getting coffee or dancing around in his apartment because he’s pining for Debora.

The character of Baby is and remains a bit of a blank slate through much of the movie. You get some sense of his past in the movie and a basic gauge of his morality but he is ultimately closer to being a collection of ticks and quirks than he is to being a fully human character and his past with the accident at times feels more like a contrivance than a believable backstory, but it is nonetheless a pretty interesting move to make an action movie starring someone like this. I also don’t know that I really bought too much into the relationship between Baby and Debora, or at least I didn’t necessarily see what Debora saw in Baby. There is definitely something of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl quality to Debora; she’s this amazing and almost angelic chick who just falls into Baby’s life and instantly falls madly in love with him for seemingly no reason other than that he’s nice and has cool taste in music. That’s not a believable relationship, that’s a nerdy crate digger’s fantasy. Granted, Edgar Wright already did try doing a dive deep into the push and pull of human relationships in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and I certainly didn’t need more of that, so maybe it’s for the best that he just stuck to a simple “boy meets girl, girl falls for boy” relationship this time around.

If the protagonist and love interest here don’t quite work perfectly Wright makes up for it by bringing a pretty entertaining assortment of colorful characters to fill in the heist crews that Baby works with. Notably, Kevin Spacey is pretty interesting in the movie even if he isn’t really venturing too far from his usual on screen persona of being this sort of intense guy in a suit. I guess what makes him interesting here is that he’s sort of a fish out of water; he’s ordering around these tattooed thugs and he doesn’t take himself as seriously as his exterior would have you think. Jon Hamm also shows up playing a bank robber with a sort of Bonnie and Clyde thing going on with his girlfriend/partner in crime played by Eiza González. It’s a pretty good vehicle for Hamm, who has been pretty desperate to show off his comedic chops after spending seven seasons playing the intense and tortured Don Draper on “Mad Men.” This is a good vehicle for him because he can be this quirky presence while still playing things straight and using that intensity that he’s capable of. Finally, there’s Jamie Foxx who plays this just completely unstable thug who adds a real streak of dark humor to the whole movie through his causal relationship to violence and general lack of control.

Edgar Wright is, above all, a filmmaker who is very interested in exploring genre tropes and seems particularly interested in the action movie. With Hot Fuzz he tackled traditional action conventions through outright parody and he also examined action filmmaking in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World he also tried to examine action filmmaking by (in my opinion rather awkwardly) adding metaphoric action scenes to what is essentially a non-genre story. With Baby Driver Wright comes closer to taking on the action movie in a more direct and somewhat sincere way. The film is not really a comedy exactly. It’s not aiming for a laugh at every turn and there are real deadly stakes involved in its various action scenes, but it’s not a movie that takes itself wildly seriously either. Action movie tropes like bank heists, standoffs, and car chases are played straight but there is a subversion in that Wright seems to be removing a lot of the bravado from the proceedings. Baby is not a typical action hero either in look or in attitude, he’s up against people who aren’t exactly the kind of evil we’re used to seeing our action heroes fight against, and by mixing almost all of them with pop music rather than Hans Zimmer scores or something Wright gives the movie an altogether different tone than someone like Michael Mann would.

As these things go I think it’s pretty to safe to say that Baby Driver is a very fun spectacle but also an ephemeral one. It’s definitely style over substance and the character beats don’t really land as well as the themes of friendship did in Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End. It’s been something like two days since I watched it and I can already sort of feel it escaping my memory despite how much I enjoyed watching it. Edgar Wright has never been a filmmaker I’ve been terribly inclined to revisit the work of despite some pretty obvious talent on display and despite it in many ways his most shallow effort I can still probably see myself revisiting Baby Driver more than some of his other movies for reasons I can’t quite place my finger on. It might simply be because it’s his least referential effort which is least reliant on overt references to other specific movies and pop culture (outside of the music). That or maybe I just really like car chases. Whatever it is that makes this stand out it’s probably the Edgar Wright movie I’ve most unequivocally liked since Shaun of the Dead, which was another movie that had to deal with the burden of a sort of terrible title that it will hopefully be able to overcome at the box office.

**** out of Five

No, but you get the impression that he'd like to.  

It's explained that he was in a car accident as a young boy which left him with Tinnitus and he likes to drown out the ringing in his ears by listening to music and can often avoid removing them because he can read lips.  Also Edgar Wright wanted an excuse to fill the movie with diegetic music.

I was looking forward to Baby Driver, but I did have some concerns going in. Namely, though Edgar Wright is clearly a very talented filmmaker, I had doubts about his abilities to work without Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as co-writers. Though Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has its charms and is technically well-executed, the film’s emotional and thematic streak does not really work for me nor does the comedy. The film made me realize how much Pegg and Frost brought to the table in terms of not just humour, but also emotional weight. Thankfully, Baby Driver is a substantially better movie than Scott Pilgrim, but I do still miss Pegg and Frost’s touches.

The film revolves around a highly skilled getaway driver named Baby (Ansel Elgort) doing bank robberies for a mysterious employer named Doc (Kevin Spacey), to whom Baby owes a debt. Baby is not one for this life, and yearns to escape with his recently met girlfriend Debora (Lily James), however it is becoming increasingly clear that Doc has no intention of letting Baby leave. Within the first five minutes of the film, it’s pretty clear exactly where the story and characters were gonna go beat for beat and I was mostly right. The characters here are also a little shallow. Baby is a neat protagonist for this sort of movie with some fun quirks, but all the same there isn’t much to him and Debora is even more empty. Lily James makes for a really likable screen presence, but the character is just a little too perfect and their relationship is not quite believable.

In spite of what may seem like stock elements, Baby Driver does manage to feel unique thanks to the style and some fun details. It’s quickly established that Baby is almost always listening to music to drown out his tinnitus and thus Edgar Wright fills the movie with wall-to-wall music from a wide variety of genres. The music used isn’t really my jam, but the song selection is generally pretty cool. Wright is able to stage scenes to music very effectively and the music often taps into the emotion of a moment nicely. Wright also puts together a lot of fun action scenes, mostly car chases, but also a great foot chase and a Michael Mann-esque shoot-out. The supporting cast is also full of solid actors who work really well in their roles. Kevin Spacey and Jon Hamm in particular really stand-out. Neither are doing anything particularly ground-breaking or profound, but they both give fun turns which make good use of their screen presence. The film is a lot less comedic than Wright’s Cornetto trilogy and even Scott Pilgrim, but there is a certain humourous streak to the affair. There are some really witty lines and funny little moments throughout, which add some flavour.

All told, Baby Driver is a very fun movie which certainly reaffirms Wright’s talents as a craftsman. The cinematography is fluid and Wright’s fast editing gives the whole thing a really energetic pace. The film is also an important step in Wright’s filmography, less referential than his previous films and Wright’s general style seems to have been refined and toned down to an extent. And yet, I still see this as a step-down from the Cornetto trilogy, which brings me back to the importance of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. For all of Baby Driver's entertainment value, I was never able to connect with the film the same way I am movies like Shaun of the Dead or The World’s End. Those movies have an emotional core thanks to well-drawn characters with relatable problems who we like and want to see overcome their failings. I liked Baby and Debora too, but never really bought either fully and their struggles left me as soon as I left the theater. So, by all means, see Baby Driver. It’s a well-made and entertaining action movie with nuances which provide greater flavour and a fine craftsman at the helm, but this might not be a film to really stick with you.

B

I thought it was a fun movie. I've had some of the songs stuck in my head since I saw it Thursday. The cast was great and there were a few things that surprised me on the direction they went with some of the characters. Yes there is a lot of style to this movie over substance, but it's still something different (like they say in the RLM review). A joy to watch. I could have turned right back around and watched a second viewing once everything was over.

I'd dare say this is Wright's best directorial venture, and easily in the top 5 of the year thusfar.

Lots of opportunities for cliches and predictability were avoided. I had a lot of fun, it wasn't ever over-the-top, and I found myself caring about every character, good or bad. The stakes were high, the movie put you nice and neatly on edge, and some risks were taken and paid off.

9/10 - superb movie, total greatness

This movie never seemed like it got past the initial idea. I get that Edgar Wright thought 'what if we have a kid who's an ace driver and listens to an iPod while he burns rubber' but there really isn't a lot to the movie aside from that. The characters are inconsistent, a lot of the stuff happening has no motivation behind it, even the music feels out of place a lot of the time. I have a friend who thinks Baby Driver is one of the best movies of the year. At best it's just an easy, forgettable way to kill 110 minutes.

I still couldn't finish the movie... something about it just feels, dis genuine. It just feels like an excuse to have a kid listen to music while he races.


I love Edgar Wright and I think he's a great film maker. But this, wasn't his best film. 

It felt like I was watching Drive, but it did everything a bit worse.

**/****

Lily James is next in line to get cancelled for being a rapist.