Written and Directed by: Edgar Wright
Release date: June 28, 2017
Cast: Ansel Egort, Jon Berenthal, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzales, Lily James, Kevin Spacey, CJ Jones, Jamie Foxx
Car chases have long been a staple of the action movie genre, from films like Bullitt to the Fast and Furious franchise. They’re often a film’s highlight, with pulse pounding music and plenty of mechanical carnage. Now director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) brings his own take to this action flick staple. He’s been working on this idea since 1994, and now, in 2017, his vision comes to fruition in the very stylish Baby Driver. It’s an ode to the car chase, choreographed to a spectacular soundtrack by Ryan Heffington, and it delivers in spades over its 113 minute runtime. A couple of slower scenes put the brakes on its fast pace, but they’re thankfully brief and at least add good character moments to the film. Other than that, things start in high gear and keep going for a majority of the movie.
The film revolves around Baby (Ansel Egort), a driver extraordinaire who suffers tinnitus from an accident that killed his parents when he was a child. To stifle the constant ringing, he carries multiple iPods, all queued up with songs appropriate to his task at hand. It’s a clever plot device, and one that Wright uses to great effect, marrying scenes to a wide variety of songs from a nice variety of artists that include James Brown, Young MC, Blur, and Queen. Each song choice matches its scene perfectly, making this film nearly a musical without its characters bursting into song. It gives the film its flow and maintains it throughout, never hitting a sour note.
Baby is driving due to a debt he owes crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey, great as always). Doc constantly switches his teams for his jobs, with the one constant being Baby as his driver. Over the course of the movie, we meet three teams. The one that leads things off is a bank robbery involving Griff (Jon Berenthal), Buddy (Jon Hamm), and Darling (Eiza Gonzales). A second team brings in Bats (Jamie Foxx), an unstable character with a penchant for killing, along with JD (Lanny Joon) and Eddie (Flea). This second team has one of the funnier gags in the film dealing with Michael Myers masks. The final job brings back Buddy and Darling and throws Bats into the mix. Naturally, things are not going to go well, giving us a high octane ending that puts everything Baby cares for at risk.
And Baby has a couple of people he cares for. One is Joseph (CJ Jones), a deaf old man confined to a wheelchair who Baby lives with. The second is waitress Debora (Lily James), who works at a local diner and has dreams of taking to the road. Both characters give the film a bit of heart and some sentimentality, even though they also slow things down from the scenes involving Baby’s work as a driver. Their scenes do help us as the audience to catch our breath, while providing some solid character moments and something for Baby to fight for. Their jeopardy is somewhat predictable, as we can tell anyone involved with Baby who does what he does may find themselves in the crosshairs. But the actors make it work, with Egort sharing an easy chemistry with both Jones and James. Those relationships humanize what could have been a robotic character, which thankfully Egort never lets Baby become.
The rest of the cast is solid, though some fare better than others. Gonzales’s Darling is one we’ve seen before, the tough tattooed girl attracted to danger. Foxx’s Bats serves as the film’s villain more or less, though again it’s nothing new being brought to the role of a basic psychopath. Berenthal’s Griff is good, but is all too brief in the film, and feels a bit wasted here. Spacey does what he does so well, and that’s command your attention when he’s on screen, being at once a mentor and a threat to Baby. Hamm fares the best here, showing his character of Buddy to be nicely layered and likeable. His progression in the film for the first successful job to one that goes terribly wrong feels natural and provides its share of thrills towards the climax.
In all, Wright has put his own stamp on the car chase in the action movie, delivering some superbly thrilling sequences all choreographed to an outstanding soundtrack. A couple of slow scenes and stock characters hold it back from approaching masterpiece territory, but despite that this is still one of the best action movies you’ll see this year, and holds its own when being measured up against similar films of its genre. Baby Driver starts fast, and keeps going, all to its own beat, making this one of the most fun times you’ll have at the theater this year. Don’t miss this one.
