Review: Baby Driver

Edgar Wright's Baby Driver is an exhilarating, ridiculously satisfying action musical fable that emphatically announces its intentions within its opening seconds. Taking its cues from Walter Hill's The Driver, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, and Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (in which he directed the fake trailer segment "Don't"), Baby Driver moves to its own beat. Literally. Wright designs the entire film around its glorious soundtrack, nearly every cut, word and gesture slave to the rhythm.

Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a driver, specifically the wheelman for criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey), to whom he has been working off a debt. They're almost straight, Doc tells Baby, all he has to do is one more job. That's good news for Baby's deaf foster parent, Joseph (CJ Jones), who worries about what Baby does to earn the money he's been stashing under the floorboards. Of course, "one more job" is practically a death knell in this type of film and the first discordant chords are sounded when Baby meets the latest crew that Doc has assembled for the job.

Eddie No-Nose (Flea) and JD (Lanny Joon) seem harmless enough, but Bats (Jamie Foxx) gives off dangerous vibes. Bats is suspicious of Baby, who barely says a word and whose earbuds rarely leaves his ears (a car accident left him with chronic tinnitus, which he drowns out by listening to music) but who takes in every last detail. More portents surface minutes before the robbery - JD gets Mike Myers masks instead of Halloween's Michael Myers, Baby has to re-cue the music track he selected - and all hell breaks loose. Security guards and even an ordinary citizen are hot on their trail, but Baby is a devil behind the wheel and they manage to escape, though Baby soon sees firsthand how truly ruthless Doc can be when it comes to dealing with those who mess up his plans.

Baby may be straight with Doc, but it doesn't mean that Doc is done with him. He wants Baby for another job and Baby better be in or Joseph might end up worse than deaf and Debora (Lily James), the waitress Baby is sweet on and who reminds him of his beloved mother, might not be so pretty anymore. The trigger-happy Bats is back for the latest heist, so are husband and wife team Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Darling (Eiza González), who prove themselves a killer duo in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, Sailor and Lula, and Mickey and Mallory. Buddy, in particular, gives Bats a run in the psycho department and it wouldn't be too much of a surprise to learn that the majority of the glee in Hamm's performance derives from shedding his suave Mad Men persona once and for all.

If there's a nit to pick in this tremendously energetic and good-natured film, it's Elgort himself. It never bodes well when one can envision a handful of other actors in the role - Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jr. at Elgort's age would have been perfect. The trick with the character of Baby, especially in the first half, is that he's not really so much a character as an image. He's framed to be James Dean/Steve McQueen-cool as he displays his driving prowess, his gliding strut down the sidewalk evokes John Travolta's Saturday Night Fever swagger, but Elgort simply does not have the magnetism to draw the eye and that lacking would be cruelly exposed if the film were stripped of its sound and its stylistic touches. Compare Elgort with Gosling in Drive; the former recedes into the surroundings whilst the latter remains front and center.

That said, Elgort is more effective in the second half of the film when Baby's romance with Debora deepens. Part of this is due to James, who has enough winsomeness for the both of them, but also because Elgort works comparatively better when bouncing off other actors. He's genuinely great in the diner scene that culminates in a tense square-off with Foxx's Bats, and ably conveys the essential goodness in a character constantly surrounded by the worst of the worst.

Baby Driver

Directed by: Edgar Wright

Written by: Edgar Wright

Starring: Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal, Eiza González, Sky Ferreira, CJ Jones