BABY DRIVER (2017) - Movie Review

       Move to a song. Go ahead. Snap your fingers, move your head, stomp your feet. Go along with the melody, along with the rhythm, making sure every precise beat or note in the song corresponds with your movements. Free yourself in the music, feel your weight collapse from it. Once you’re at this stage, start to dance. Start to strut, to skip, to sing. And after that, cruise your getaway car at full speed through the tunnels and alleyways of downtown Atlanta in order to complete heists, robberies, stick-ups, and the like. Congratulations, you’re in the world of Baby. Yes, his name is Baby. You know, like the human species from the rough ages of zero to fifteen months. Like a baby, he doesn’t say much. Like a baby, he is adamantly shy. Like a baby (who listens to music), he listens to music. 

       Though it isn’t Baby Mozart that drives the new Edgar Wright action-thriller, it is music, so much so that even with its burning rubbers and humming engines and screeching asphalts, the film could be compared less to a Fast and Furious and more to a Singin’ in the Rain. Like, if Gene Kelly had jumped off the lightpole, James Bond-ed his umbrella into a shotgun, and barrelled through a bank heist before jumping into a cheetah on wheels off into the sunset. That’s your little insight into Baby Driver. Does it sound cool? Does it fire up your senses? Does it seem like the ultimate summer movie? The answers should be yes, yes, and yes because the answers are, in fact, yes, yes, and yes. Overtime there may have been some clouded thoughts over what is the ultimate summer movie, and its presence might have been confused for money. We are in the age of the summer comeback, saying sayonara to the sloppy stuff and wholly welcoming the wonders of the summer hit. And make no mistake: Baby Driver is the summer hit.

       Through the regular truisms of Edgar Wright editing and flashes and crash zooms and whip pans, we find ourselves in the center of Baby’s world (with a strong performance by un-John Green-ified Ansel Elgort), who makes his living in a Drive-esque manner of being the local criminals’ Uber driver. He does this with attentive care and indifferent morality until he meets a girl (shocker) who forces him to question his decisions and his involvement. Of course, he’s got Kevin Spacey on his back, Jamie Foxx down his throat, and a ringing in his ear which only music can drown out. It’s a thrill-ride that is so good not on the basis of its content alone, but how well it’s paced, and how unpredictable the results are even when the circumstances are so clear.

       Like its main character, Baby Driver doesn’t do a lot of talking; instead, its audio counterpart is divided between its ongoing, rebellious, vintage soundtrack -- with a combination of modernist and classic that the film itself likes to jump-rope between -- as well as its action sequences, which may just be the crown jewel of the whole thing. There’s not much to limit Wright here, because these scenes play to his greatest strengths, and this is well-aware to him; every moment in these sequences is glorious, silky-smooth, and just...art. If you cannot put on a serious face and say, these car chases around Atlanta, for all their violence and havoc, are *beautiful*, then you haven’t seen Baby Driver (so stop reading and go out and watch the damn thing).

       Though there is certainly violence in these scenes, I don’t believe Wright has to create justifications for his violence; people have been imploring him, and us, to think about what it says in our culture for a movie to include gun violence is just another part of the show, as anecdotal, as a catchy technique or lens through which the story is told. What, then, does it say about our culture that we observe these “faults” and analyze them in a film alongside other moments of Jamie Foxx’s character turning to others and asking them, “Do you really think I know a fuckin’ thing about Barbra Streisand?” Baby Driver may not be an objective eye; in the stylistic approach, there are glorifications that seem to be made. But it certainly isn’t endorsing those on screen which battle our protagonist; their violence is his regret and a part of his demons, and so too for the audience.

          Wright’s latest is great. It’s wholesome. It redefines the summer movie while still having the rebellious attitude of “we don’t care about definitions”. It captures a contradiction between moving forward and throwing it back, between creating precise details and making it raw. It holds so many elements, spinning so effortlessly in its runtime, it’s more of a movie buffet; take what you want and be happy, because there is so much there, ripe for the picking.  It’s loud, brash, abrasive, bold. It’s thunderous, mischievous, hilarious. Its heat burns to the touch, but its icy cool is the foundation of its story, allowing itself to be outright slick as the wheels that drive it forward. It’s a masterwork of the summer movie.