High-octane Baby Driver has the Wright fuel injection
Print Edition
THERE’S nothing like an epic getaway chase to kick a film into high gear, and the first five minutes of “Baby Driver” are pure movie magic.
A driver named Baby (Ansel Elgort) sits coolly in a car black with Ray-Ban style shades on his face, earbud headphones in place and a jacket that’s, fittingly, somewhere between Ferris Bueller and Han Solo. His tough-looking passengers (Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Bernthal) exit with comical menace and assault weapons in hand. Baby sits back, cranks up “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and air guitars his way through the sequence while the others rob a bank and exit in a hurry. That’s when things really get going as Baby steps on the gas and speeds away from the cops with heart-pounding, exhilarating polish. It’s a car chase for the ages. It should be no surprise then that what comes after doesn’t quite live up to that initial jolt of adrenaline.
Director and writer Edgar Wright crafts a slick, stylish and wholly original action epic with “Baby Driver,” which is both as good as anything you’ll see in theaters this summer.
It’s about an outlaw kid with a good heart who is at a crossroads. Some youthful indiscretions put Baby in debt to a big-time criminal orchestrator, Doc, played by a perfectly over-the-top Kevin Spacey. Baby’s been doing the dirty work of driving Doc’s baddies ever since.
We meet Baby two jobs away from being in the clear. To outsiders, he’s an odd duck. He doesn’t say much and he always has a pair of headphones in his ears. But this isn’t just any aloof millennial. The headphones, and omnipresent soundtrack, are there for a reason: Baby’s got tinnitus and the music helps drown out the “hum in the drum” as Doc explains.
The only people he engages with are his guardian, Joseph (CJ Jones), who is wheelchair-bound and deaf and the waitress of Baby’s dreams, Debora (Lily James).
“Baby Driver” is a swerve into seriousness for Wright, who has given us some witty genre send-ups in the past, whereas James, a terrific actress, is reduced to a cartoonish character who’s only there to give our hero something to care about.
In this underground world, no one is “real” they’re all slick coats of paint and simulated cool, right down to the carefully calculated soundtrack. But what more do you want from an action pic?
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