Baby Driver is directed by Edgar Wright and feels like a departure from his earlier work, such as Shaun of the Dead and The World's End. While Baby Driver is very good, and earned a high grade from me, I found it to be slick and shallow compared to Wright's previous films which, I feel, are funnier and have more heart than the director's latest.
Actual baby-faced actor Ansel Elgort stars in the title role as Baby, a young man with savant-like driving skills and a nasty case of tinnitus left over from a car accident that took his parents' lives as a kid. Baby drowns out the endless ringing in his ears by constantly listening to music, which means this movie has a bitchin' soundtrack.
Baby works for Doc (Kevin Spacey) as a getaway driver for Doc's various heist schemes. Baby is indebted to Doc after stealing one of his cars as a kid. Doc tells Baby that after this next heist they'll be square. Of course, after that heist is completed, Doc comes back to Baby and blackmails him into participating in another heist by threatening violence against Baby's girlfriend, Debora (Lily James), and his deaf foster father, Joseph (CJ Jones).
Among Doc's gang of criminals are Buddy (Jon Hamm), his wife Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), and the macho and highly unstable Bats (Jamie Foxx). Putting Buddy and Bats on the same heist team is like putting two siamese fighting fish in the same tank. The two testosterone-fueled men butt heads immediately, threatening to fuck up the entire mission. Suffice it to say, this heist doesn't go as planned.
I won't give away any more of the plot, but I will say that it is action-filled, set to an awesome soundtrack, and often very funny and violent.
My initial feelings upon leaving the theatre was that Baby Driver was an AWESOME movie. But after more reflection, I think that the film was actually pretty shallow, especially given what I know Edgar Wright to be capable of. Don't get me wrong, Baby Driver is fun. It is entertaining. It has some truly amazing action sequences.
But the characters and their relationships are hopelessly flat. The relationship between Baby and Debora is entirely lacking in chemistry and, just...boring. Debora's wish to "head west in a car I can't afford with a plan I don't have" made me roll my eyes so far back, I could see the back of the theatre. The characters all having fake names hiding their real ones is more of silly affectation than anything that adds to the plot. The attempt to give the characters solid backstories, such as Buddy being a Wall Street party animal before turning to a life of crime comes off as slapdash instead of organic.
I will say, the one relationship that felt 100% real was Baby's relationship with Joseph, his foster dad. There's a scene between the two of them near the end of the movie that actually brought tears to my eyes.
If Baby Driver had been directed by someone else, I'd probably ignore this lack of depth, but I know for certain that Edgar Wright is capable of making the audience laugh, weep, and scream all in the same movie. The World's End, which was about friendship, making peace with the past, the ravages of alcoholism, and also aliens proves that the director is able to craft a film both entertaining and profound. Same with Shaun of the Dead which had some truly gut-wrenching moments along with lots of laughs and zombie gore.
So, to me, Baby Driver is actually a step backwards for Wright. Even so, a step backwards for such a gifted director is still miles ahead of many of the shitty action movies Hollywood churns out each year.
Grade: B
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