Baby Driver Review

• 26th Jun 2017

What can be said that hasn’t already been said about Baby Driver. Edgar Wright’s latest offering is bombastic, visceral, funny, endearing and downright lovely. A semi noir film with a beast of a soundtrack, each track and scene the perfect partners.

The reason the soundtrack is, if not must, be great is that it drives the story. Our main character is Baby, a young driver whose main source of income is speeding criminals out of harms way following some form of heist. He does so with his headphones in place, the perfect song for the getaway always in his ears.

The timing of the start of the heist and the start of the song just be perfect, otherwise it won’t work. But the headphones are needed for a second reason; Baby suffers from tinnitus following an accident as a child, the music drowns it out. He works for Doc, a kingpin of sorts who uses a different crew for each job, but Baby is always the driver.

Baby is working his way through until he can get out, when he meets Debora, a young waitress with a similar love of music, and a want to simply drive and get out of dodge. But, as is usually the case, there is always one last job.

Baby Driver works because it is simply original. If it was possible for something to be more unique than unique, this would be the case in point. The action set pieces are something else, the car chases sublime, and each of the characters have depth, not just the main players. We come to learn the ticks of our various crew members, from the batshit Bats (Jamie Foxx), the cool but edgy Buddy (Jon Hamm), and the calculated kingpin himself, another menacing turn from Kevin Spacey.

Our lead almost certainly has the least amount of lines of the litter, but that doesn’t mean his performance is any less powerful. Ansel Elgort, previously seen in the Divergent series, is the calm in amongst the storm that is Baby Driver. He oozes cool, almost never without a pair of shades and certainly never without an iPod.

It seems that the UK may now have finally lost Edgar Wright to Hollywood, though we should have guessed as much when he was tapped up by Marvel, even though that did’ end as many would have hoped. But if the man who brought us the cornetto trilogy is able to pull something as fun and interesting as this off, then so be it. If you love something, set them free and see what they can achieve. It seems that Wright is destined for greatness, as is Baby Driver.

Baby Driver is released in the UK on June 28th