Baby Driver (2017)
IMDB Rating : 8.3/10 (as on 16.07.2017)
After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young
getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.
R | 1h 52min | Action, Crime, Music
Director: Edgar Wright
Writer: Edgar Wright
Stars: Ansel Elgort, Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm
IMDB link Here
Movie Rating : ★★★★★
Edgar Wright's infectious car-chase thriller will make you
believe in magic
Robbie Collin
The fact that the DNA of Edgar
Wright’s new film has been lying dormant in the lyrics of a Simon &
Garfunkel B-side for almost half a century just makes it even more of a
delight. “I was born one dark grey morn with music coming in my ears,” the
songwriting duo crooned on 1969’s Baby Driver: “They call me Baby Driver, and
once upon a pair of wheels, I hit the road and I’m gone.”
Those lyrics sum up everything
that matters about Wright’s latest picture – a car-chase thriller about a
getaway-driving cutie-pie savant whose every move behind the wheel is in
Olympic-level sync with whichever song is pulsing in his iPod earbuds – while
capturing around 0.3 percent of what it feels like to watch it. The Italian
director Bernardo Bertolucci was once credited with making "intravenous
cinema", but there’s no better imaginable description of Baby Driver,
which seems to shoot directly from the screen into your arteries.
The film’s clicky synergy of
music and movement is its big selling point, and is set out immediately in a
breathless introductory bank heist.
Three further members of the
stick-up crew, played by Eiza González and the Jons Hamm and Bernthal, gawp
ecstatically in their seats throughout, and their astonishment is catching.
While the cleverness of the cutting stuns you for the first verse or so, once
the chorus kicks in and the pursuit begins in earnest, you stop actively
noticing the technique, and start to ride it.
Wright has been rattling away
in the language of pulp cinema since the very start. Even in Spaced, the
turn-of-the-millennium TV show he created with Jessica Stevenson and Simon
Pegg, every whip pan, crash zoom and smash cut served its purpose.
Thanks in part to a directorial
approach that involves treating every action sequence like a musical number: in
interviews, Wright has explained he rigged every set-piece around its backing
track. That stylistic choice keeps Baby Driver a canvas-shoed hop and skip
apart from its most familiar forebears – not least the planed-down 1978 chase
movie The Driver, directed by Walter Hill, whose crunchy baritone makes a brief
off-screen cameo.
But it also couldn’t have
worked without Elgort, who was something of a charming blank slate in films
like The Fault in Our Stars and the Divergent YA franchise, but who under
Wright’s direction proves to be one of those great screen movers like Richard
Gere or Channing Tatum: you just want to watch him do stuff.
Swinging and spinning in a
plain white tee, dark skinny jeans and off-brand sunglasses, Elgort brings a
physical musicality to every on-screen task – even the mundane ones, like
making a peanut butter sandwich for his deaf, wheelchair-bound foster father (C.J.
Jones) – that has you jiving in your seat. (Baby soundtracks his world because
music drowns out his tinnitus – the “hum in the drum” he sustained from a
scarring childhood trauma that also broke his iPod Classic, and more besides.)
In fact, the film is so in love
with the snappiness of its script, the characters keep remixing their own and
each other’s dialogue. “You rob to support a drug habit, I do drugs to support
a robbery habit”, offers Jamie Foxx’s psychopathic Bats, after taking what
feels like a well-aimed stab at Hamm and González’s sordid backstory – while
Baby secretly tapes his partners, both in crime and out of it, in order to
sample their coolest quotes in his home-made music.
The mechanisms at work in Baby
Driver, while calibrated with hair’s-breadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s
what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork
to show you what spins what. It’s like watching a magician perform the greatest
card trick you’ve ever seen while simultaneously explaining how it’s done, and
being stunned twice over.
That’s not to say the arch tone
of Wright’s earlier films has been jetttisoned. The archness has just been
carefully fenced off from the film’s story-world – so when Kevin Spacey, having
a ball as the gang’s leader Doc, annunciates every malice-tipped line as if
it’s destined for the trailer, or Lily James, as Baby’s waitress girlfriend
Debora, drawls dreamily of “heading west on 20 in a car I can’t afford, with a
plan I don’t have,” no-one on-screen flinches.
Read full review at Telegraph
Movie Rating : ★★★★★
Boy racer hits all the right notes
Mark Kermode
A romantic musical disguised as
a car-chase thriller, Baby Driver combines the over-cranked action fantasies of
Hot Fuzz with the poptastic sensibilities of Scott Pilgrim vs the World. At its
centre is Ansel Elgort’s eponymous getaway driver, who uses earphones to drown
out the “hum-in-the-drum” of tinnitus (the result of a childhood accident) and
orchestrates his life to carefully chosen iPod playlists. Whether he’s burning
rubber or fixing a peanut butter sandwich (“right up to the edges”), this
former joyrider spins his wheels and records with the same infectious
exuberance. Think An American in Paris meets The French Connection, or Walter
Hill’s The Driver as remade by Baz Luhrmann – it really is that much of a
blast.
Anyone familiar with Wright’s
2003 music video for Mint Royale’s Blue Song, in which Noel Fielding danced in
the seat of a parked getaway car, will know that the writer/director has been
nurturing Baby Driver for years. Indeed, the film opens with an explicit nod to
its small-screen dry run, with Elgort lip-synching to Bellbottoms (“fabulous,
most groovy”) by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion while his cohorts rob a bank.
Later, he halts a job until he’s correctly cued up the frantic bass riff
opening of the Damned’s Neat Neat Neat, and searches for Golden Earring’s Radar
Love before flooring a jacked ’86 purple Chevy Caprice. As for that “one killer
track”, Queen fetishist Wright brilliantly turns to Brighton Rock to provide
battling guitar accompaniment to a multistorey showdown of head-banging
elegance.
It’s not just the action
sequences that strike a chord. The toe-tapping opening titles find Baby doing
an on-foot coffee run to the beats of Bob & Earl’s Harlem Shuffle, lyrics
magically appearing on walls and signs in a scene as seamless as the opening
freeway dance from La La Land. At times the songs serve as an on-the-nose Greek
chorus, telling us that Baby has “nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide” as he’s
trapped in an arms deal. But it’s when the horns and drums of the Button Down
Brass’s Tequila become gunfire, or the madness of Hocus Pocus by Focus drives a
breathless chase, that Wright really puts his foot down, with exhilarating
results.
“You’re either hard as nails or scared as
shit,” Baby is told, although like the young bucks of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
or Risky Business, he’s actually a bit of both. As for Wright, he directs with
the confidence of someone who can afford to pay fanboy homage to his
antecedents, whether casting Paul Williams as the Butcher in a nod to Smokey
and the Bandit, or getting Kevin Spacey to bark “Don’t feed me any more lines
from Monsters Inc… it pisses me off!”
A top-flight stunt
co-ordination team (Darrin Prescott, Robert Nagle, Jeremy Fry) and a hip
choreographer (Ryan Heffington) work together in perfect harmony, while
cinematographer Bill Pope uses the Atlanta locations with the same affection
that John Landis brought to Chicago in The Blues Brothers. If you want a
soporific night out, go see Hampstead. For something with a little more torque,
then, Baby, it’s you.
Read full review at The Guardian
In ‘Baby Driver,’ It’s Kiss Kiss, Zoom Zoom
MANOHLA DARGIS
In
“Baby Driver,” the director Edgar Wright is out to show you a most excellent
time. He’s never been one of those filmmakers who expect you to be blinded by
the bright sheen of his résumé, which includes comical genre rethinks like the
zombie flick “Shaun of the Dead” and the cop caper “Hot Fuzz.” Mr. Wright works
for your love, hard enough that you notice the whirring machinery if perhaps
not the strain. He wants it easy and breezy, although mostly he wants it cool,
whether the latest means to his end, Baby (Ansel Elgort), is smooth-moving like
Gene Kelly or burning rubber like Steve McQueen.
A
genre ride with a rebuilt engine and a sweet paint job, “Baby Driver” is all
about movement and sometimes stillness and how a beautiful man looks (feels,
seems, is) even better when he’s in glorious, syncopated, restless motion. The
first time you see Baby — that’s his handle, which suits Mr. Elgort, with his
angelic face and young man’s lissomeness — he’s in the driver’s seat, where he
belongs. The car doesn’t look like much, just a cherry-red box with doors and a
spoiler. Like us, Baby is waiting for the action to start, seemingly sealed off
from the outside world with his dark sunglasses and earbuds.
That’s
wonderful company to keep and to learn from, especially when you’re as cleverly
attentive a student as Mr. Wright. Baby drives hard, fast, tight and seemingly
oh so effortlessly, spinning wheels across pavement like a Russian Olympian on
ice. In the eye-tickling opener — a wham, bam, we’ll-take-the-cash-ma’am heist
— Baby peels out in that red box (a souped-up Subaru) and motors into one of
those warped Road Runner chases that builds momentum with near escapes,
not-even-close winking and the twangy throbbing of “Bellbottoms,” from the Jon
Spencer Blues Explosion, a group once unforgettably described by the critic
Robert Christgau as “avant-travestying da blooze.”
“Baby
Driver” isn’t avant-travestying; it’s a pop pastiche par excellence, crammed
with cubistic action; glowering and golly-gee types (played by the seductive
likes of Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González and Lily James); and an
encyclopedia of cinematic allusions, all basted in wall-to-wall tuneage. At
times, the whole thing spins like a tribute album, a collection of covers of
varying quality: diner yaks à la Quentin Tarantino, Godardian splashes of
color. When it works, the allusions give you a contact high, like when a friend
turns you on to a favorite movie. At other times, Mr. Wright’s pleasure veers
into the self-satisfied, and all that love feels smothering, near-bullying,
like bro-cinephilia in extremis.
In
the main, it’s easy to go with Mr. Wright’s flow, partly because he rarely
steps off the gas. It’s just go go go with an occasional stop for coffee or an
amusingly testy sit-down with Baby’s shadowy boss, Doc, one of those
all-seeing, all-knowing criminal mystics whom Kevin Spacey gives ominous ooze
and a daddy’s mad (maybe nuts) indoor voice. Doc has something on Baby, who’s
been forced into a life of bad behavior and company. That Baby has had no
choice but to drive along plays as knowingly implausible as it sounds. But
heroic fatalism and unwilling villainy remain enduring cinematic tropes,
including in gangster movies, even if it means holding convention over
complexity.
There’s
much to enjoy in “Baby Driver,” including the satisfactions of genuine
cinematic craft and technique, qualities that moviegoers can no longer take for
granted. The edits snap, the colors pop and the cinematography serves the
performances and the story rather than embalming them in an emptily showy,
self-regarding directorial conceit. The emotions are mostly rote and cold, but
the car chases are hot — at once fluid, geometric and rhythmic, with a beat
Baby carries with him out of the car whether he’s on the stroll or the run.
(The director of photography is Bill Pope; the editors are Paul Machliss and
Jonathan Amos; and the stunt coordinator is Darrin Prescott, leading an army.)
“Baby
Driver” is so good that you want it to be better and go deeper, for it to put
down its guns (or at least hold them differently) and transcend its clichés and
cine-quotes so it can rocket out of the genre safe box into the cosmic beyond
where craft and technique transform into art. That’s admittedly somewhat of a
greedy complaint, particularly given how much Mr. Wright does right and that he
clearly wants you levitating out of your seat. It’s difficult to carp about a
director who wants to please the audience this much (instead of, say, the
franchise suits). At the same time, you have to wonder where Mr. Wright might
go if he cut loose from his influences and let a little feeling muss up his
form.
Read full reiew at New York times
Movie Rating : ★★★✬☆
Baby Driver is The Fast and the Furious: The Musical
Paul Byrnes
Every
generation reinvents the car movie to suit its own self. Oldsters had Bullitt
(1968), a taut police thriller with Steve McQueen, the most beautiful rebel of
his era, and then Duel (1973) where Spielberg made paranoia the main dish.
After
being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds
himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.
Nobody
has completely trusted a trucker since – unless it was Burt Reynolds driving.
Duel was about the growing and quite reasonable fear in white America at the
time that the country was out of control.
The Fast
and the Furious franchise has dominated the last decade, to the point of
becoming dull, even with the excellent car action, so it was time for a
reinvention, but this? Baby Driver is almost a musical, given how much the
music dictates the rhythm of each scene.
Jamie
Foxx and a cast of tattooed tough guys blast their shotties in time to beats on
the soundtrack, as if trapped in an MTV clip. Cars do wheelies to drum solos
from bands I haven't heard from since Bonzo Bonham was alive.
You can
almost tell the director is not American, because he is infatuated with
Americana. Shiny Detroit iron, an honest-to-goodness long diner where Baby woos
his sweetheart Debora (Lily James), and severe, modernistic Atlanta locations,
emphasising cement and the street.
British
comedy specialist Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) then layers in a
rich mix of tracks, from all over: in fact, the soundtrack might be his best
achievement. From James Brown to Alexis Korner, Queen to Lalo Schifrin and the
Dutchmen from Focus? How deliberately eclectic can you get? But that sense of
deliberateness is its own drawback.
You want
it cool? Wright refrigerates it, with more sunglass action than an episode of
Miami Vice. You want it different? Elgort makes a street ballet out of getting
four coffees from a nearby diner. You want it nice and bloody? Foxx loves that
pink mist.
It's all
bolted together like clockwork, an assemblage of elements designed to arouse
and engage an audience that needs a reason to stop looking at their phones.
That
means the film has a beat, rather than a heartbeat, at least in the first half.
Wright directs those introductory scenes for maximum wow factor rather than any
dramatic sense. He's directing a series of commercials and the product is an
interruption, a demand for attention.
That may
be what it takes now to settle an audience into the place you want them, before
you can construct a story. Or it might just as easily be seen as a capitulation
to the aesthetics of the connected generation, for whom a movie where one
character wears earphones and shades all the time does not seem affected.
If you love the
movie, Wright is a genius for recognising that. If you don't, he's just another
British blow-in trying too hard for the front ranks at CAA and the big budgets
that Hollywood has always offered in the place of good scripts.
Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald
Baby Driver Is Fast, Furious and
Full of Heart
Stephanie Zacharek
A great pop song is a gimmick
by design, not so different from a shiny fisherman’s lure. They don’t call it a
hook for nothing. We think we’re in control when really, it’s the other way
around. That’s how Edgar Wright’s jukebox thrill ride Baby Driver works too. In
the opening sequence, an unnervingly serene young getaway driver evades a
clutch of cop cars while lost in his own personal earbud reverie. He’s got the
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s 1994 fuzzed-out rave-up “Bellbottoms” dialed up
on his iPod, and the music inside his head is also in ours. The kid’s got
style, but we can see that he’s a little off—it’s probably not a good idea to
linger in his brain. Still, how much could it hurt to stick around for a bit
and see what else is on his playlist? And what he does next? And whom he
answers to, and why? Also, maybe there’s a girl.
Fish hooked, if not yet cleaned
and cooked.
In those early moments, we may
think we know exactly where Baby Driver is going and how it’s going to get
there, and in some ways we do.
At first Baby seems more an
invention than a character, a collection of traits and quirks that might not
add up to a whole person. But scene by scene, Wright (who also wrote the
script) and Elgort give him shape and soul. Baby drives because he has to—he’s
paying off a debt to smooth criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey). But he’s
hardly a pushover and stands up to the bullying of the thieves and bandits he
counts among his passengers, including a psychotic hothead played by Jamie Foxx.
He lives with his elderly, wheelchair-bound foster father Joseph (the wonderful
CJ Jones), who is deaf, which might seem too obvious an irony in a story about
a kid who’s ruled by music. But when Baby meets a girl he likes—diner waitress
Debora, played by the radiant Lily James—he comes home, animated with joyous
energy, and sets Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y” spinning on the stereo. Joseph puts
his hand on the speaker, feels the vibe and smiles. Then he signs, “I approve
of the girl.”
Baby Driver is also, of course,
an action thriller. Wright has orchestrated every swerve and near smashup—and
one glorious foot chase—with precision, a rarity in action filmmaking these
days. The picture riffs on the seedy pleasures of ’70s drive-in classics like
Walter Hill’s The Driver—which Wright has cited as an influence—and Richard C.
Sarafian’s Vanishing Point. The plot is shaggier than it needs to be, but it’s
still more streamlined than any other picture Wright has made, including Shaun
of the Dead, The World’s End and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Those movies, while at times
enjoyable, all have a kind of smirky Neverland quality, a “Lads, let’s never
grow up!” vibe that no filmmaker, not even one as clever as Wright, can
sustain. But Baby Driver, with its vivid, openhearted energy, is a bold step
forward. Movies are supposed to keep us young—that’s one of their jobs. But you
can’t keep gunning the arrested-development engine forever. With Baby Driver,
Wright finally breaks free, and the result has a beat you can dance to.
Movie Rating : ★★★★☆
An entirely original piece of jukebox filmmaking
Geoffrey Macnab
In a summer of yet more
synthetic blockbusters, Baby Driver feels entirely original. This is jukebox
filmmaking, a wildly energetic movie whose characters behave in line with the
songs that fill its soundtrack. It has soul, blues, jazz, a bit of punk,
Britpop, easy listening, some glam rock and even a little Simon and Garfunkel.
Much of the pleasure here lies
in the sheer zest and ingenuity with which writer-director Edgar Wright moulds
the music to the mood – and vice versa. His screenplay rivals that written by
Quentin Tarantino for True Romance (1993) both in its wisecracking wit and the
way it combines hardboiled gangster movie tropes with youthful romanticism.
Wright has cast the film in a
sly way. The main character, Baby, is played by Ansel Elgort, the young
American actor best known for tearjerker The Fault In Our Stars (2014). He’s
the clean-cut boy next door type and yet Wright has him playing a getaway driver.
“He’s a good kid and a devil behind the wheel,” we’re told. His routine is
always the same.
Near the start of the movie,
Wright throws in a tremendous Fast and Furious-style chase sequence which
entails Baby roaring the wrong way up freeways, squeezing his car through the
narrowest of gaps, running past countless red lights and wreathing his way
through traffic as the cops follow behind. He is a virtuoso – “Mozart in a
Go-Kart,” as he is nicknamed –and “too fast to die.”
Off duty, he hangs out in his
apartment with Joe (C. J. Jones), a wheelchair bound old man who can only
communicate through sign language. When he is not listening to music it, he is
making it, mixing tapes from random conversations he has recorded.
Early on, the film feels like a
spoof: a cartoonish, tongue in cheek version of the traditional Hollywood heist
movie touched with Wright’s familiar British irony. (He is the director of
Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, after all.) Helot’s “Baby” is such a carefree
and laidback character that it is hard to imagine that too much darkness will
be allowed to intrude into the storytelling.
The film, though, has an
unexpectedly nasty streak. Subliminal flashbacks hint at distressing events in
Baby’s childhood and explain why he is just so obsessed with his mother. As the
heists continue, we realise that innocent people as well as guilty ones are
dying in profuse numbers. Buddy and Bats have little compunction about using
their guns.
In amid the mayhem, Wright
chronicles the burgeoning affair between Baby and the beautiful young waitress
Debora (Lily James) he meets in his regular diner. As they joke about songs, make
small talk about their respective names and go to the laundrette together, they
behave like young lovers on leave from some 1980s bratpack movie.
They seem to inhabit an
entirely different world to that of Doc and his associates. To Debora,
Goodfellas isn’t a Scorsese gangster film but the local pizza chain. Lily James
plays the waitress with considerable charm, as if she is a blue-collar version
of Cinderella. She’s opinionated, witty but also touchingly naive. (Her
innocence, unlike that of Baby, isn’t put on). She thinks Baby is a chauffeur
and doesn’t even begin to suspect that he is a driver for the mob.
There are times when the film
begins to tie itself in knots. The carefree scenes between the young lovers sit
uncomfortably next to the more twisted and macabre episodes. When the two
worlds collide, we expect the sweet natured and sensitive Debora to be
distressed by the bloodshed but she is as little affected by it as Baby
himself.
Wright goes out of his way to
give the minor characters depth and back story. At the same time, though, the
storytelling remains highly stylised. The main protagonists are deliberately
caricatured stock types - heavies who wear shades indoors and out and who speak
in he kind of hardboiled, very arch language that you expect to hear in
Tarantino movies. “In this business the
moment you catch feelings is the moment you catch a bullet,” Bats warns Baby.
There is a ritualistic feel to
events – a sense that Bats, Buddy and co already know their fate and are acting
out pre-ordained roles. Occasionally, the film risks stalling and becoming
self-conscious and even pretentious. Whenever this happens, though, all it
needs is for Baby to get back behind the wheel with some new music to inspire
him.
“Don’t trust anybody but each
other, and don’t look back,” is the advice he and Debora are given as they take
to the road. The message may sound glib but that doesn’t make it any less
exhilarating.
Read full review at Independent
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