Director Edgar Wright synchronizes a great soundtrack to the car chases.
What if Ryan Gosling’s Drive were a live-action cartoon with music from The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Queen, and more cop cars than all three Smokey and the Bandit films?
Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) provides an answer with his conceptually ambitious, but flawed, Baby Driver.
High concept eclipses the plot in importance. Baby (Ansel Elgort) is the getaway driver for a series of heists, listening to music on his headphones to drown out the ringing of tinnitus caused by a childhood accident. The music literally becomes the soundtrack to his life.
Baby works for kingpin Doc (Kevin Spacey), and with a rotating crew that includes professional Buddy (John Hamm), Buddy’s girl Darling (Eiza González) and stereotypical thug Bats (Jamie Foxx). Baby wants to drive off into the sunset with his mild pixie dream girl Debora (Lily James), but Doc has one more job for Baby that he can’t refuse.
The first scene expands Wright’s music video for ”Blue Song” by Mint Royal, in which the music punctuates movements within the frame and vice versa. In Baby Driver, the sound-image play extends to a good old car chase approaching the scale of chases in The Blues Brothers. The cartoonish spectacle delivers genuine thrills and audacious conceits. A series of bushes zooming by in the foreground provide a visual rhyme that’s just as exhilarating as the main action.
When Baby fetches coffee for his colleagues in a long take, Wright showcases the potential for his concept beyond spectacle. With nimble technique, Wright delivers sound-image matches, rhymes and puns as Baby and the camera dance together to “Harlem Shuffle.” Intricately choreographed movements deliver vibrant, seemingly spontaneous moments.
Unfortunately, by the third act Wright simply turns up the volume instead of introducing variation and complexity. The sound-image play continues, but in far more predictable ways, like gunshots matching drum or bass lines. The genuine chemistry between Elgort and James gets lost in the cacophony.
The plot turns to action cliches that Wright mocked in Hot Fuzz (2007), including several back-from-the-dead moments. Hamm’s Buddy transforms from cool professional to manic psychopath in the course of six shots (bullets, not images), and we know he’s evil because red light bathes his grimacing face. Wright abandons all subtlety.
One inspired act followed by two relatively disappointing acts still trumps most blockbusters. Wright’s inspired first act still qualifies Baby Driver for the best action film of the summer.