Movie Review: In “Baby Driver”, Edgar Wright Proves He’s Not Only Faster, But Furiouser Too

Edgar Wright pumps up the jams in Baby Driver, the best car chase musical since The Blues Brothers. (Admittedly, it’s a narrow genre.)

Baby Driver is menacing, which is not the adjective I expected to use for something called Baby Driver.

And it’s certainly not a word I thought would ever need to be deployed for an Edgar Wright movie.

His previous flicks (like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) aren’t frivolous, but they are masterpieces of giddy, jokey metatextuality. They’re a hoot-and-a-half and another half-hoot.

Baby Driver is a whole lot of fun too. Yet I keep returning to that word: “menacing”. It's unlike anything Wright’s done before, because here, his energetic and impossibly precise filmmaking skills are being used to create actual peril. Used to be he did it for the lulz. He's fed plenty of people to zombies and (hilariously) impaled someone on a model replica of a church steeple, but we’ve never seen him properly end a life. ‘til now. There are fewer laughs, overall, because now the stakes are really, truly, deadly serious.

Ansel Elgort stars as Baby, a getaway driver with tinnitus (or, as his criminal keeper Doc—Kevin Spacey—calls it, “a hum in the drum”). To drown out the ringing in his ears, Baby wears headphones at all times, playing music to which he can time his erratic driving. It means the bank robbers who team up with him are at the whims of whatever’s on his iPod. It also means Baby, who’s stuck working for Doc in Georgia until he pays off a debt, can disassociate from his crimes, singing and jiving to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion or Queen behind the wheel while the heist takes place.

That changes when he’s assigned to an especially reckless and homicidal trio (Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez). Suddenly, the good-hearted Baby is confronted with a big boy problem: How can he keep the crims from murdering innocents (potentially derailing their big score), without getting his waitress sweetheart Debra (Lily James) killed in their fit of revenge? More importantly, how to soundtrack their escape? Baby—and Wright—find the perfect track for every occasion.

Baby Driver

Almost every moment of Baby Driver is synchronised to Motown or ‘70s rock, with the noises of Atlanta’s environs (door chimes, construction work, elevator dings, that thing where you run fingers around the rim of a wine glass) punctuating the 30-something songs assembled by Wright (who has apparently been sitting on this idea for 23 years, testing the concept on this 2003 music video). It gives the feature the feel of a “sung-through” musical. You can heap praise on Heat, The Driver and Reservoir Dogs—big inspirations, I’m sure—but you can’t give them that. No one’s ever compared Ronin to Sondheim. You can with Baby Driver.

Elgort emphatically dances and lip-syncs throughout, except when sitting stoically in Doc’s headquarters (though that’s probably because, at 6ft 4in, he’d tower over Foxx, Hamm and Spacey). He’s a hard person to root for in life, mostly because of his DJ persona, Ansolo. As the sweet and southern-accented Baby, it’s easy. Helpfully, he’s supported by the hugely warm and charismatic Lily James, and is put up against Foxx and Hamm, who go to particularly dark and threatening places to ensure no one confuses them with any of Wright’s other, earlier, friendlier villains.

However, the stars of the show are Wright, his cinematographer Bill Pope, the stunt team and the rest of Wright’s crew (especially the usually unsung sound mixers and editors). The heart races and the mind reels from the opening car chase, where a stunning, whip-fast 180-degree turn down an alley precedes a pulse-pounding freeway pursuit. It’s matched later in the picture, when the crooks have to abandon their vehicle and literally leg it to Focus’ psychedelic “Hocus Pocus”.

As Fast and Furious turns to CGI (which at least allows for further car v. submarine battles), Edgar Wright proves his practical effects and uncanny kinesthesia is best for delivering that big-screen rush.

4/5

In cinemas July 13. Rated MA15+ for strong violence.