Stylish movie, sometimes too loud and fast for my taste

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 2017)

BABY DRIVER is an action packed tale of a quiet getaway driver for heists planned by Doc, a crime lord played by Kevin Spacey. Baby lives alone with his deaf foster father after his mother died in a car accident, and he falls in love with Debora, a waitress at a local diner. Wanting to stay away from the heists, Baby only finds himself sucked deeper into a crime-filled underworld.
The story is filled with themes we know: The beautiful girl as symbol for a normal life outside of crime. The theme of not being able to stay away from crime, and the underworld harming the one's closest to you. And the theme of the fatherly yet dangerous crime boss who took a young boy under his wing. But while we've seen many of these ideas in other movies, BABY DRIVER manages to implement them with grandeur.
Sometimes the originality of a movie lies not within its story, but its execution, and it is here where BABY DRIVER excels. The movie does some really new stuff with sound: Baby has tinnitus and always numbs his pain with loud rock music. This serves as the movie's excuse for a manic fusion of music and action. And as we come to expect from an Edgar Wright movie, this audiovisual collage is craftily edited.
Despite the impressive style and the great acting (with criminals played by the likes of Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm), I found the movie too loud at times. What jarred my ears was less the music than the car noise and gunshots. Perhaps this was my local cinema amping things up too much... but oh did my ears hurt after some of the action scenes!
On top of that... and this is only nagging at the very high level of an otherwise excellent movie, I felt that the pacing was a bit irregular. The movie starts and ends really fast but has a long stretched-out middle part. This is important for character building, but the macro-rhythm of the story arch felt a bit jagged...
But again, only small concerns regarding an otherwise impressive piece of film that is definitely one of the must-sees this year!