So what happens when you mix a music video with a mediocre action movie? You get a strangely fresh, audacious and sassy crime musical from the director of Shaun of the Dead

Rating: 7/10 (6 July 2017)

As I watched Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, another movie came to my mind in comparison: Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive. These movies are in many ways different but are both about getaway drivers with strange names. Despite its visual style and all the talent involved, Drive disappointed me personally due to all the over-hyped acclaim from critics and its excruciatingly slow pace all the way through. Baby Driver makes Drive look like Battlefield Earth. This is a movie with enough fun and originality to tick the boxes off to becoming one of the better summer blockbusters of 2017. After his clashing involvement with Ant-Man, Edgar Wright is back on track again, even though this isn't his best work.
Here we have Baby, a getaway driver working for a mob boss with a gang of rivals, but he has a special trick up his sleeve he has compared to the others: he can listen to music for 24 hours straight and while he drives, playing different songs that demonstrate the mood that he feels at every moment. He comes across a waitress named Debora (played nicely by Lily James) who he starts to date, but then a final job pops up in the pipeline that causes everything going for him to be sacrificed. Some plot points feel familiar here, but it is the superpower-like idea of music that gives them a shakeup. Had it not been present, the movie would feel unoriginal obviously, but the cast may have saved it from becoming a disaster. Who knows and who cares? What we have here is good enough.
This is writer/director Wright's first film to be shot in the United States, which feels like a risky detour for his filmmaking roots, but the end result is, after his four-year directorial absence since The World's End, he luckily hasn't skipped a beat. This is his most unlikely film since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World but is thankfully and once again a very good, if not quite great, feature. You see and feel his love for music and cars, but his trademark style is often hard to find. There are no comedic scene transitions (probably as this isn't billed as a comedy) in the editing and his frantic camera movements have dialled down slightly, which makes his latest feature all the more interesting and experimental.
The other thing that makes this a different Wright movie is the use of an all American cast: Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey, Ansel Elgort, Jon Hamm, Lily James, you name it, a bit of a Tarantino-like collaboration going on. Elgort is flat-out amazing as Baby, conducting an often expressionless character but with a confident brain. He has the heart of an old school heartthrob in the music scenes and is engagingly subtle in the more intense scenes. Spacey is as good playing an average mob boss as he can ever be, while Foxx is on fine form and Hamm is what you can expect from a cut-throat mob rival as he pulls off rough facial expressions.
To call this a Mamma Mia! for people who didn't like the 2008 hit would be an understatement. Car chases and shootouts are present, but songs in the background give the crime genre a layer of soul, creative juice that has been thrown off so often by bleak atmosphere and bloody violence. There are a few long takes of singing that try to compete with the musical numbers from La La Land but with already published lyrics. Whenever the songs are absent, the film descends into action thriller territory and leaves you yearning for the next cue. When they're rolling, the film is a music video stretched to feature length.
While starting well and ending with hope, it drags slightly midway through as it bogs down telling the story in a serious manner, and the final showdown feels a tad formulaic, forgetting to be original like the rest of the movie. But they are saved by a jazzy atmosphere and nicely chosen songs (look out for Queen). It isn't as wacky as Scott Pilgrim nor as funny and iconic as the Cornetto trilogy, and the cinematography and costume design are nothing special, but what you can safely say about Baby Driver is that it is not a noisy and soulless migraine like the rest of modern action flicks. It has a brain, confidence at influencing pop culture and, finally, a bit of pride for writing and directing in the action genre. Now that's really saying something.