Baby Driver *** (2017, Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey, Eiza González, Jamie Foxx) – Movie Review

Writer-director Edgar Wright’s trendy 2017 thriller Baby Driver motors along well, sometimes spectacularly well, for three quarters of its running time on its strong, quirky premise. Then, suddenly, it messes up a big action scene, with a trunk full of guns and cliches and lack of logic, and then simply can’t get back on the road again. It finally crashes and burns in a prolonged anti-climax that simply doesn’t need to be there. It’s easy, cut off the dross at the end.

Wright just doesn’t know when to stop, but giving more is much less here. He drives his film into the ground, just when in needs to go into over-drive to send you home exhilarated. Instead, he sends you home with ear ache and maybe a headache too.

Now this is a real shame. It’s good as a popcorn movie, but, with two or three more re-writes, it could have been great, etching its place as a memorable movie. As it is, it is fun, but really you would never want to see it again.

Ansel Elgort stars in a big, fat, showy role as Baby, a young getaway driver who is coerced by creepy crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) into taking part in his bank/ post office heists. Just when Baby thinks his debt to Doc is paid, Doc forces him into one last heist.

The whole edifice hinges on Wright’s skills and on Elgort’s. They are pretty good. Elgort relishes his role as the kid who has to hear music in his ear 24/7 following the car crash he was in that killed his arguing mom and dad. Elgort is appealing, no doubt about that, and he needs to be to carry the movie and drive it along. OK, the whole edifice also hinges on the endless vintage pop tracks playing on the soundtrack, most of them with Baby in the title. It’s a funny idea, and weirdly it never gets stale in the film, when it probably should. 

Wright’s writing is sometimes inspired and sometimes shaky. He’d have been better either turning his movie into a jokey Ocean’s Eleven affair, or going into reverse and going full throttle with violent, spaced out True Romance-style thriller. Wright gets caught in the middle. The jokey bits are a lot of fun. All he needed are quite a lot more good, quirky jokes and way less violence, especially gun violence, and killing. This would make his movie a lot more likeable. It is easy.

Elgort and Lily James as Debora, the waitress he wants to drive off with, are charming and entirely likeable. Their scenes together zing and sparkle. James has much less to do than Elgort but she does it well and is sweet. You really want them to end up together. But Wright sends in the action thriller violence, making Debora’s decision to follow Baby to the ends of the earth ridiculous. Anyone, everyone, would run from the psycho-seeming Baby, even if Wright keeps banging on about how essentially kind and nice he is.

Spacey has a mini field day. It’s pretty slack and easy work for the Oscar winner, but he does what he can with it, and that’s quite a bit. He’s the daddy – the psycho Baby is going to grow up to be, complete, of course, with a heart of gold.

Jon Hamm and Eiza González have a great time as even more psycho gang members Buddy and Darling. They play it to the hilt, and pull it off nicely. Hamm has a bit too much to do, in repetitive stuff as the killer monster who won’t die, but he does what Wright asks of him well. It’s round about this point that you realise there’s no actual story, just a series of eye-catching scenes.

Another Oscar winner, Jamie Foxx, gives the offhand impression that he seems to feel he is slumming in a very slack performance as Bats, another psycho gang member, mumbling most of his lines. Paul Williams is truly awful as the psycho The Butcher. It is with his appearance and performance that the movie starts to fall apart. Too many psychos in the movie, and all the same kind of psychos, are you thinking?

To be fair, there are some exhilarating action sequences, some sleek performances, some great laughs and that great soundtrack on the movie’s side.

Incidentally, I waited the whole movie to sing along to Baby Love, and it never happened! Luckily, though, we do get Simon and Garfunkel’s Baby Driver from the 1970 Bridge over Troubled Water album over the closing credits. How could we not? ‘They call me Baby Driver, And once upon a pair of wheels, Hit the road and I’m gone, What’s my number?, I wonder how your engines feel.’ Some things never get old.

Baby Driver is directed by Edgar Wright, is written by Edgar Wright,runs 112 minutes,is made by TriStar Pictures, Media Rights Capital, Working Title Films and Big Talk Productions, and is released by TriStar Pictures (2017) (US) and Sony Pictures Releasing (2017) (UK).

It was a big hit. Costing $34,000,000, it grossed $107,825,862 in the US, and had a cumulative worldwide gross of $228,104,185.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com

Theo James and Ansel Elgort.

Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver (2017).