Great Entertainment, a Little Dull Towards the End

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2017)

The trailers to this movie looked very promising, so I did have somewhat of a high expectation.
In the first half, maybe even two thirds of Baby Driver, my expectations were definitely met. Not exceeded, but met. A particular strength of Baby Driver is the unusual style of creating action scenes. Through the music - which is the key element in the movie - everything is in tact. Gears changed, guns shot, everything happens on a beat, which makes the movie very fast-paced at times, though always comprehensible. I enjoyed that. The camera work is good like in any other decent action movie and apart from some rare one-takes or tricky movements, it's nothing jaw-dropping.
The characters were a thing I enjoyed too in the first part of the movie. I had the feeling that the cast was well put-together. Ansel Elgort plays a great protagonist with his quiet, almost shy aura; when things tend to get serious, though, he becomes very confident, all while remaining incredibly sly. The scenes with his crush Debora are very entertaining as well. While it may seem a little over the top-mysterious at times, it's all done with the right amount of decency.
Then of course, there are the gangsters. Kevin Spacey makes an awesome boss, feeling very authentic and on point. Sure, what we found out lately about him is terrible, but he was and is a great actor. The rest of the gangster squad relies a little too much on clichees maybe (The overly erotic couple, the black dude with the hood accent and the guy who dies and whose role is changed with every new coup), yet is still entertaining.
All those largely positive things I've now listed become kind of irrelevant towards the end of the film. While experiencing a very long police/gangster/free for all kind of hide-and-seek-game where we quickly lose track of who's dead, who's the bad guy and the good guy, the plot which unfolded quite nicely in the beginning become more twisted, not necessarily in a good way though. We don't know what Baby and his girl are up to anymore, to the point where I just kind of stopped caring about them. The movie wants to present a "different" ending, but it fails at realizing this in a good way. Eventually, the happy ending we've all been hoping for does happen, just with a 20 minute delay full of things we've either seen before or didn't want to see at all in the movie.
All in all: The movie has a great entertainment factor. You're drawn into the story, the action scenes are nicely crafted and everything seems in place. The ending makes you wish you weren't drawn into the story that much though.
If Baby Driver was 20 minutes shorter and didn't have the wannabe twisted ending, I would have given it a 9 or even a 10