A genre classic

Rating: 9/10 (2 July 2017)

I have to admit I've never been a massive fan of Edgar Wright, (with the exception of the highly imaginative "Scott Pilgrim Versus the Wold"). His genre comedies never seemed as ground-breaking as he, and lots of others, seemed to think; entertaining to be sure, but hardly classics and now "Baby Driver" arrives, swathed in hype and glowing reviews and would you believe it, for the first thirty minutes or so I thought, here we go again, nowhere at very high speed. Then something happened; I'm not sure what or at what point. Was it a line, (and there are a lot of good lines), or just a bit of action that didn't feel too derivative? Anyway, suddenly I started to get drawn in and finally I was hooked.
What hooked me? Well, not Baby for sure. Ansel Elgort is a good-looking kid, like the guys you see a lot nowadays in advertisements; the kind of guys who are meant to sell you the products but who are actually the kind of guys I, for one, would like to slap...hard. And he never really changes. He meets a girl who is also cute and she has a very wide smile and very white teeth. She's played by "Downton Abbey's" Lily James and I wanted to slap her too though by the end I had kind of warmed to her a little. She's put into danger and I'm a sucker for a damsel in distress. No, it wasn't Ansel and it wasn't Lily that hooked me or even drew me in, so who? That's easy. "Baby Driver" has three of the best bad guys I've seen in a movie in years, not to mention some of the best stunt driving as well as a cracking script from Wright. Easy to get hooked, then. The bad guys are Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm and there's a pretty tough cookie of a bad girl played by Eliza Gonzalez. Spacey is Mr Big. He's a villain but his Achilles Heel is a a soft spot for Baby and Spacey carries off the tough/tender side of his character brilliantly but it's his henchmen, Foxx and Hamm, who are the real villains, (Foxx, in particular, is the kind of guy who would blow away a baby sooner than look at him), and they would lift a movie half as good and send it off into the stratosphere and they do. They make being this bad feel like fun; as does Wright. He was, of course, up against it, through "The Driver" to "Drive", "Baby Driver" had a lot to live up to and it does. There's a moment near the end when it evokes "Thelma and Louise" and any mention of "Bonnie and Clyde" is bound to be dangerous. We're not in that class, I admit, but Elgot and James notwithstanding, "Baby Driver" is still a genre classic.