Nick Cabelli for Cinetalk.net
Baby Driver is a ‘car chase’ movie by Edgar Wright with only 2 brief car chases and 1 scene of mild parcour. The guy from Madmen is one of the thugs, Jamie Foxx is another thug, Kevin Spacey is the head thug, yadda yadda. Two whitebread leads [Ansel Elgort and Lily James], terrible lip-syncing, a selection of tunes so facile that a cursory search for “top 10 [genre] songs” would generate most of the film’s soundtrack, and a plot that is pure convenience leaves this flick full of good performers delivering terrible dialogue until they can get to the next plot point. For a movie that is both narratively and stylistically centered on music, the staid collection of songs makes the experience feel all the longer. Was this a musical? Records don’t make noise when you play the inside part with no grooves, btw.
Honestly, gun noises punctuating the sound design in-time with the best sounds like a neat idea and works well in the trailer, but scene after scene choreographing gunshots and car noises to music is a bit much. Everything about Baby Driver is too much, and I wish I could scrub every last image from my brainstuff [except the cameo from Paul Williams. You can stay, Paul.]
Baby Driver is out today.
