REVIEW: Baby Driver
Baby Driver is a 2017 action-crime-heist-romance film directed and written by Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz & Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). Unlike Wright’s other works, Baby Driver is an action movie instead of a comedy.
Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a young getaway driver who works for a crime boss (Kevin Spacey) and his band of robbers and longs to escape the crime world. When Baby meets a young waitress (Lily James), he has a reason to finally leave. However, he realizes getting out is harder than it seems…
It’s your typical action-heist movie…told through the eyes and ears of the getaway driver, but one aspect of the movie really makes it standout from the others: the movie is told through music. Our protagonist has tinnitus, a “hum in the drum”, as the movie describes it. He constantly listens to music to drown out the tinnitus, and the music he listens to is the movie’s soundtrack, which used to an amazing effect. The movie has non-stop music and almost every action, and even some of the dialogue, is on beat with the music. The music’s presence and its timing is so precise that the music can be considered a character. It uses music the way other movies use dialogue; it’s a language of its own.
The movie also plays with conventional tropes and twists them around, which makes for genuinely surprising plot twists. And even though the movie is told through Baby’s eyes (and ears), the other characters also have arcs they go through, and they’re subtly setup. The movie also has fun foreshadowing and mirroring its events, and yes, the arcs and foreshadowing get satisfying payoffs at the end.
Overall, Baby Driver is one of the most creative and unique movies this year. The way it utilizes its soundtrack to tell a story and how it plays with expectations only to do something different are very refreshing to see. The movie is fun, fast-paced, and the cast is incredible. Baby Driver is one of those movies where it’s impossible to be bored with and it just leaves you smiling from opening chase to the credits.
