Baby Driver (15)
three stars
Dir: Edgar Wright
With: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm
Runtime: 113 minutes
WHEN it comes to mining the furthest and most naff reaches of British pop culture, Edgar Wright is the writer-director to beat. His “Cornetto” trilogy of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End introduced large parts of the world to the joys of village coppers rounding up escaped swans, suburban pub crawls, and dispatching zombies to the tune of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me now. His was not the Midas touch but the iceman effect, bringing cool where there was none.
Now, in Baby Driver, Wright has a chance to turn his hand to the real deal of Hollywood cool, the heist movie. Going the Oceans 11/Three Kings/Italian Job road is not easy, and while he runs out of juice long before the end, a star-packed cast, a slick and witty script, a pop classics-crammed soundtrack, and yes, gallons of cool, are enough to get the job done.
Ansel Elgort, an actor with the look of a young Brando, plays the Baby of the title. Why he is called Baby is one of the film’s guessing games. It might be his fresh out of the wrapper looks, or it could be, as another character suggests, because he has yet to say his first words. Baby, you see, is a man of few sentences, which is probably just as well given his job as a getaway driver for a gang of bank robbers in Atlanta. An otherwise good kid (in what is clearly the hipster definition of sainthood he looks after an old person), he would like to be a million miles away from relieving banks of their customers’ money, but a debt to a crime boss (Kevin Spacey) means needs must until he has paid back what he owes.
While driving, while doing almost everything, Baby is plugged in to one of his many iPods. It helps with the tinnitus he has suffered from childhood. More importantly, it also ensures Wright can have a stream of music playing throughout the film.
Make that a torrent of music. Within the first five minutes he racks up two tunes, and pretty much carries on the pace from there. The music is by Steven Price, the Oscar-winning composer behind Gravity, but the choices are vintage Wright, or rather vintage AN Other middle-aged male. All the classics are on the soundtrack, including Bob and Earl’s Harlem Shuffle, Carla Thomas’s B-A-B-Y, Martha and the Vandellas’ Nowhere to Run, plus more contemporary stuff your aged and crumbling reviewer had to look up. This being an Edgar-Wright script, there are further nods to that middle-aged male audience demographic with lots of movie in-jokes.
Giving such prominence to music has its advantages and otherwise. Certainly, it lends the picture an immediate, effortless veneer of cool, and softens the edges of the grisly business of robbing banks. But having so many tunes can also make the picture seem flimsy, like one big pop video with a sliver of a story tacked on. After the first hour, as the film enters a baggy middle section, that latter thought becomes more nagging.
Just as well, then, that Wright has a belter of a cast to add substance to all the style and posing going on. Besides Spacey as the Mr Big, Jon Hamm (Mad Men’s Don Draper) and Jamie Foxx play members of the stick-up gang. Lily James (late of Downton Abbey) impresses and charms as Debora (of course the T-Rex song turns up), a waitress who has Baby thinking that he really must get a wriggle on and get out of this life of crime.
Wright handles the car chases as if to the handbrake turn born (if he wants to direct the next Fast and Furious movie he probably only needs to ask), and that flabby middle section aside he maintains a zippy pace. This is a director having the ride of his life, one going all out to bring the audience along in the passenger seat. Just don’t look too closely at what is whizzing past, and you too will have a blast.
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