Films > Film Reviews

Baby Driver

Cinema City

30/06/17

It all started with an explosion. A Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, to be precise. Twenty two years ago, writer/director Edgar Wright was sitting around listening to JSBE on his minidisc player or whatever, and thinking “this would make an awesome car chase movie scene.” Well, two decades later his fifth movie opens to the sound of squealing tyres and Bellbottoms. That’s the song title, by the way, and there’s no shortage of flair as our hero Baby, a wheelman for a bank heist, screams through the streets of Atlanta in a bright red Subaru with the police in hot pursuit. As he tears up the tarmac in what is undeniably one of the best car chases ever seen on screen, it becomes quickly apparent that this driver is a cool customer. He’s got a boot full of loot, a back seat full of baddies, and he’s wearing sunglasses. But the thing that makes Baby so good at what he does, is music. You see, due to a childhood accident that simultaneously left him brain damaged and orphaned, he has to constantly listen to music via his many product-placed mp3 players to drown out the persistent ringing in his ears. The unexpected side effect of this is that Baby develops phenomenal concentration and, what I guess you would call, a certain feel for the rhythm of the car and the traffic.

So, basically, you’ve got a teenage getaway driver, who develops almost supernatural driving skills when listening to loud music, and is being forced to work for a mob boss called Doc (Kevin Spacey) in a series of high risk bank heists with a gang of unreliable, unpredictable, and generally unhinged armed bastards. Brilliant.

So, this movie certainly talks the torque, but can it walk the, er, worque? Well, when this film has its foot flat to the floor, it’s brilliant, and the best scenes are where the action and the music fully sync and mesh with some expert choreography - like the shootout set to Hocus Pocus by Focus, or the crash-filled car chase to Golden Earring’s Radar Love. It’s when the movie puts the brakes on that it starts to choke a little. There’s serious talent on screen, with Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, and Eiza González to name three of the criminal cast, and they play their roles well as a psychotic street-thug, and a pair of sexually amorous partners-in-crime respectively, but the script is clichéd and the characters grow increasingly ludicrous and

cartoonish. Also, for me the romantic interest between waitress Deborah (Lily James) and Baby never really revs up.
But it’s not about that, as I said it’s about the action and the music. Cars and guitars. So, if the idea of violence, fast action, and loud tunes sounds like your kind of thing, then check out Baby Driver.

7/10