British writer-director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) apparently loves car chases twice as much as the next moviegoer.
Thankfully, he also knows how to get his new movie, the brilliant comic heist-love story Baby Driver, from A to B in the most entertainingly quirky way possible. If there is a conventional way to get his thieves from the bank to the rendezvous point, Wright seems to have forgotten it.
Baby Driver
90 Cast: Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Kevin Spacey, Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez, Flea, Jamie Foxx, Paul Williams, CJ Jones, Lanny Joon
Director: Edgar Wright
Rating: R, for violence and language throughout.
Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Simply lead-footing away from the cops is insufficient. Baby (Ansel Elgort) doesn't merely go off road to get his passengers to freedom and ill-gotten fortunes. He drives the getaway vehicle in places that most motorists wouldn't try. He has as little respect for the laws of physics as his partners do for the law in general, and Atlanta cops have trouble determining who is keeping the city's thieves from their clutches.
Much of the charm of Baby Driver is that neither the character nor the story fit easily into the profile for an illicit chauffeur. Baby rarely speaks and is constantly hidden behind a pair of shades and earbuds. He's not trying to be coolly detached. Afflicted by tinnitus, turning off his iPods or his tape players (he still uses analog stuff, too) results in him hearing an unpleasant, unceasing ring. That may explain his well-defined musical tastes; ordinary tunes can't stave off the torment he feels in a quiet room. (The idea for the film came from a Mint Royale music video that Wright directed nearly 15 years ago.)
As his nickname, he's sort of a lost soul. His parents are gone, and he's in the care of a foster parent named Joseph (CJ Jones) who's deaf and wheelchair bound. Elgort imbues Baby with an appropriate innocence so that his eccentricities are more endearing than annoying.
Baby has to deliver robbers from justice because he's indebted to a seemingly omniscient crime boss known only as Doc (Kevin Spacey). Doc plans heists in microscopic detail and rotates his crews so they can't identify one another when things go bad. Only the wheelman stays the same during each robbery.
Doc's trigger crew have nicknames like Baby's: Buddy (Jon Hamm), Griff (Jon Bernthal), Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), JD (Lanny Joon) and Eddie (Flea). Unlike Baby, they don't have goals outside of crime, and they often resort to Second Amendment solutions.
Baby would rather mix what he hears in idle conversations into music and get to know a friendly waitress (Lily James, Cinderella) a little better. Perhaps he's drawn to her because she has an actual name, Debora, instead of an alias.
Baby doesn't need scolding from Joseph to know that he'd be safer keeping pizza from getting cold in a car, but Doc is a walking CD-ROM, knowing every millimeter of the Atlanta crime scene. It's a safe bet he doesn't offer a good severance package.
In addition to thinking of great ways to burn rubber and reduce cars to wrecks, Wright manages to do the same thing for Atlantans that he does for Londoners. Baby Driver feels lived in and treats the city as more than a simple backdrop. He and his crew find areas of pursuit that don't look safe or mundane. He also creates a fascinating rogues gallery. Having a pair of Oscar winners in the cast certainly helps, but Wright toys with viewers about what they'll do. Similarly, the soundtrack has classic songs by the Beach Boys and other hitmakers, but they aren't the ones that clog the playlists of oldies stations. Wright assumes viewers are paying close attention and love obscure references and deep cuts. Thankfully, his obsessions are incurably contagious.
MovieStyle on 06/30/2017