Baby Driver is based on a idea Wright says he's been kicking around for years: An action movie about a getaway driver who listens to music constantly to drown out his tinnitus. It owes obvious debts to two traditions of action film: one, the heist film, and two, more specifically, getaway flicks like Walter Hill's much-cited 1978 The Driver where unflappable white men sit cooly behind the wheel of a car.
The good news is that Wright's riff on the elemental heist film offers genuinely exciting action and electric formal experimentation. The car chases and gunfights are beautifully coherent; the camera snapping lucidly around in concert with growling sound design and impressive stunt work. Baby Driver's action is unusually kinetic for a multiplex movie, but it's the marriage of sound and editing that takes it into the stratosphere.
Wright and editors Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss choreograph and cut almost the entire film to the beat of their fairly conventional 70s-focused soundtrack (there are a few Atlanta rap luminaries sprinkled in, given the setting), but they really ramp it up for the action scenes: Everything on screen locks into the music, like gunshots pounding in percussive rhythm, creating something of an action musical. Brian May's hyperactive guitar work on Queen's "Brighton Rock" turns the film's car-on-car climax (not, strangely, a chase, but satisfying nonetheless) into a near-abstract whirl of red-and-blue light, twisted faces lit in flashes behind windscreens, glass shattering.
The bad news is that the movie around the action is disappointingly conventional. Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars) plays Baby, the getaway driver, and his time in the YA adaptation mines makes him a natural when wooing his love interest Debora, played by Lily James (Cinderella). He is not nearly as convincing at toughness, or internal conflict; his face squelches and he mostly looks a bit constipated. Baby and Debora's romance hits every expected beat, but Elgort and James play it adeptly. The other players — Kevin Spacey relishing the chance to underplay something for once as the boss, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Eiza Gonzáles and Jon Bernthal as various criminals—handle their one-liners nicely.
Wright's script feels nipped and tucked into near-anonymity, circling a few fussy scriptwriter's-darling phrases for way too long — a bit about "us, music, and the road" is reprised into oblivion — and abandoning its wit for a maudlin ending that commits the cardinal sin of meandering on and on despite landing on a perfect final shot. As if to underscore this divide between riveting action and flat drama, cinematographer Bill Pope's photography appears leached of life during the film's downtempo parts, with few exceptions pale and anonymous.
But strangest of all, the film sets up a bunch of situations in which the lily-white Baby is kind to a person of color — whether his foster dad, a bank teller or a woman he's politely carjacking — only to wheel them out at the end to quite literally vouch for Baby at trial. Not only is this dull, tie-off-the-loose-ends screenwriting but it's a tone-deaf evocation of the staggering racial disparities at the heart of the American justice system. Far be it from me to assume a director's intent, but that can't have been the intended takeaway.
Still, the beige slurry of superhero movies has all but replaced this kind of rock-solid action filmmaking; in that light the tightly wound car-on-car violence of Baby Driver counts as a public service.
This article appears in Jul 6-13, 2017.