Bland, Loud, Adolescent - you're gonna love it

Rating: 2/10 (7 July 2017)

Velveeta filmmaking to its warm, gooey fantasy finish, this two hour time-waster seems to be provoking about as much adoration as that excremental insult, Mad Max-Fury Road. It'd be entirely forgivable/forgettable, if only this weren't the probable end of Edgar Wright's signature dish - mysteriously perfect balancing of action and comedy sunken in plots that you can't see the end of from their opening credits.
At the outset, the miscasting of Baby seems the main obstacle to endure. Ansel Elgort, perfectly believable as a coffee delivery boy, never convinces as a getaway driver badass, and his lip synching and street scampering are Mentos commercial ready. Minutes later, it's clear that posturing-as-performance is all we're going to get from anyone on screen. With the exception of Jamie Foxx, the actors make so little impact they could have been played by anyone. Spacey snores through his lines and looks vaguely relieved to be run over. Jon Hamm seems ever more like a one-character wonder and Eiza González plays hot and dangerous like her character notes were "be HOT, and DANGEROUS." This is fantasy, right? That's why every improbable moment is tolerated, right? So what's with the flavor-free, tight-assedness? I guess I should just be grateful that they didn't include Block-O-Wax Theron as one of these ho-hum maniacs.
The lineage here is at least a little interesting. Taken as a triptych - The Driver/Drive/Baby Driver - this edition loses in nearly every category save whiplash editing. Ryan O'Neal appeared equally miscast in Walter Hill's gloomy, preposterous original, but both he and the film began to exert centrifugal force around the halfway mark that made the whole haunting, if lacking the exhilaration that most seek in a wreck-em-up flick. The second coming of Ryan (Gosling) solved that with a silence (the flow through character trait of the three films) that suggested vitality in reserve, rather than living death (O'Neal) or sad puppy (Elgort). If you found Drive boring, you probably don't find much of interest in reality either. I suspect this Baby was made especially for you.
It isn't such a surprise that elders like George Miller and Ridley Scott risk tampering with their legacies to stay in the game (have a look at Hitchcock's last release). But Wright seemed in his prime, making deals that didn't sacrifice style, advancing the proper scale and focus of B movies, understanding that they needed the ridiculous as well as moments of genuine outrage. With the success of his big Baby, how likely is it that he'll turn away from a seat at the Blandmakers table? Not too. Another genre specialist sucked into the hotdog factory. Sigh.