That's not bolognaise, Baby

Rating: 9/10 (10 July 2017)

Action movies are musicals!
It's an idea that's titillated film studies scholars for years - characters expressing themselves through the elaborate, narrative-pausing spectacle of shootouts and car chases in lieu of song and dance breaks. But it takes a director as fastidiously committed and immaculately mad as Edgar Wright to properly literalize the idea. And in his hands, rock-steady but drumming with excitement, we have Baby Driver - a movie as unabashedly nostalgic as it is fresh and innovative, hat-tipping to the era of Steve McQueen cool while pushing the envelope past pastiche and parody into new frontiers for the 'car chase film,' or even action genre. It's also one of the most infectiously kinetic, technically flawless, and uproariously fun times had at the movies in years - a Fast and the Furious for film buffs, conductors, and any adjacent audiences swept along for the ride.
You know that feeling of cathartic exhilaration and deep satisfaction you get watching a particularly well-edited music video, that synchronizes action beats to the timing of the song? Wright kicks that out of the park with a pulse-pounding opening heist/chase, already the most thrilling thing seen in years. Already, it's impossible not to marvel at how painstaking each movement (right down to the eyes!), sound effect, and action is matched to the song - if the adrenaline rush left any space for conscious admiration, that is.
And then. He just. Keeps. Going.
That's right - Every Single Cut in Baby Driver is precisely synchronized with the timing of an almost wall-to-wall soundtrack awesome enough to make Quentin Tarantino and Peter Quill tap their toes in envy, like a retro-Hollywood Stomp. Even the soundtrack-free dialogue sequences are so precisely timed they carry a 4/4 rhythm and keep the beat like scat interludes (listen carefully, and you can practically hear Kevin Spacey conducting his own soliloquies). It's a remarkable, unprecedented feat of mad scientist editing that is an almost deliriously impressive feat to behold in a Hollywood film - a nearly two-hour pop-rock-funk-soul opera bursting at the seams with slick style and exuberant joie-de-vivre. Call it a gimmick if you will, but I dare to to find a gimmick as meticulous, committed, and downright rip-roaring-fun.
And as for the story amidst the spectacle? Wright is a careful and ingenious enough writer to ensure he's in the driver's seat in regards to 'one last job' clichés rather than letting them drive him. He pumps in enough twists, turns, a laundry list of pop culture winks, and moments of savagely bonkers humour (come for the Michael Meyers; stay for the Monsters Inc.) into the overly familiar framework to keep it as fresh and interesting as can be. Certainly there are nitpicks - a couple of third act reversals are so earnest and contrived it's almost sweet, while Wright's unfortunate trend in vastly under-writing female leads continues with Lily James' Deborah, who, despite James' radiant charm, is transparently a plot-propelling prop rather than organic character.
Still - when we're strapped to the hood of Baby's chariot, slamming around the city with some of the most plentiful, playful, and voraciously fun car chases of the past several decades (amazingly, without a lick of CGI, a-la Mad Max: Fury Road), all the more dizzying through Wright's trademark hyperkinetic, whip-pan editing and concussive sound effects? A more bonkers, spectacle-ridden action climax than the average budget-bloated blockbuster, even more dazzling by being purely done with practical effects? Watching Baby ricochet a barbed wire road block into a pursuing cop car mid-turn, still in time with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bellbottoms?" Three words: F*cking. Cool. As. Hell ('oh sh*t; that's four words').
Wright's cast all excel at embodying their bevy of '90s Tarantino film archetypes' with as much slick charisma and idiosyncratic oddness to ensure their walking through predictable beats is anything but predictable. As the titular vehicular savant, Ansel Elgort proves himself an enigmatic leading man for the ages, hitting the perfect balance between unflappable, impassive cool and goofy charisma. Watching him sashay his way across town in a long take tracking shot - itself a playful riff on the opening to Wright's Shaun of the Dead - to the Harlem Shuffle may be one of the most irreverently joyful sequences to grace screens this year. Kevin Spacey could play his 'steely but paternal' mob boss in his sleep, were his articulate eloquence and exquisite comedic timing not signs of his being very much awake. Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm both steal scenes with tremendous aplomb, each nailing an impeccable balance of being tremendously unpredictable and frightening and deadpan hilarity, while Eiza González provides a steady, smirking foil for their hamming (no pun intended, I swear). Finally, Jon Bernthal aces his 'seething mug' Punisher shtick in an extended cameo both disappointingly and amusingly short, while CJ Jones is charm incarnate as Baby's foster father.
Baby Driver may be Edgar Wright's most accessible, albeit least personal work of his astonishingly airtight career (indeed, memories of his having preemptively taken the p*ss out of the genre with Hot Fuzz are inescapable). But, apart from a couple of over-earnest plot contrivances, it only furthers his title as the industry's most inventive, fiendishly playful, and inconceivably immaculate maverick still working. So strap in for the most audaciously exhilarating and stupidly fun romp of the summer so far.
Firing your gun in the air during a high speed pursuit while yelling "AAAAHHHHH" optional. Vroom vroom.
-9/10