To critique the critics for a moment: People who watch movies professionally are so starved for original content that even the most mediocre films will benefit from grade inflation. This is how vanity picture The Nice Guys is 92% fresh despite being derivative of the auteur’s own work to the point where a comparison to masturbation wouldn’t be over the top. But we have a new king of critical grade inflation based on originality: Baby Driver is sitting at an astonishing 97% fresh.
97%. For a movie that asks sentient mannequin Jon Hamm not only to act but also to be the only character in the film not acting as if he has suffered massive head trauma. When Jon Hamm is doing your emotional heavy lifting, your movie is in trouble.
The story follows Baby, the vehicular equivalent of “Pinball Wizard” by the Who, with driving instead of balling pins. Actor Ansel Elgort chooses to play Baby’s childhood trauma (his talented musician mother and abusive father die in an auto accident while Baby listens to his iPod) like run of the mill autism, as Baby is not only the best wheelman to ever live but also a talented musician despite his tinnitus. That statement tells you all you need to know about the logic of the film.
The story checks all the boxes for standard issue heroism on its lead. Baby loves music, has a cute blue collar girlfriend, despises violence, cares for an elderly black man who is deaf, and has a love for life, dancing through the street while continuously listening to his iPod and pantomiming to whatever song happens to come on. The only thing left is him swerving his car to avoid hitting a dog, which will presumably be in the director’s cut. One of the few things to the movie’s credit is that not only do hardened criminals find Baby annoying, so do coffee shop baristas and diner owners.
But because the film needs the audience to care for Baby despite common sense screaming otherwise, it makes all the other characters either odious or complete and utter morons. Jamie Foxx plays a crook who wears things like a shirt with a giant King of Diamonds on it, lacking the wherewithal to see the humor of such a move, presumably because he’s so hood (yo). Kevin Spacey cashes his check as a criminal mastermind who has pulled off dozens of robberies perfectly and yet hires Jamie Foxx’s sociopath TWICE. The aforementioned Hamm is one half of a Bonnie and Clyde duo with Eiza Gonzalez. Gonzalez pops as Darling but much of her screen time is dedicated to getting Hamm’s Buddy over as a major Man To Be Feared, despite him not being particularly fearsome until the final 30 seconds he’s in the film. It bears mentioning again that Hamm is not a good actor. Buddy could be hungry, confused, suffering from hemorrhoids. Anything but a stone cold killer or professional criminal. Whatever the film was going for with him, it missed. The characters are so stock that Walmart has already cornered the market on their distribution network. This isn’t even mentioning the ingenue waitress girlfriend or the deaf old black man, who are in the film because science hasn’t found a way to make a tape deck act.
All that said, Flea and Lanny Joon put in a serviceable five minutes as crooks who seem to be fully aware of how absurd and stupid this movie is.
These stock characters are giving a fittingly stock story: Baby acts as the getaway driver for different crews pulling off heists in Atlanta, all in the service of Spacey’s mastermind. But don’t worry, Baby isn’t a bad guy, just a kid who got into debt doing kid things and has to work it off. Just when he thinks he’s out, he gets pulled back in with threats of violence to his newfound girlfriend. And after countless heists that went off perfectly off-screen, this one heist is the one that breaks bad. Baby’s conscious causes him to run afoul of Jamie Foxx’s psychopathic killer (who was hired by the criminal genius TWICE. That cannot be stressed enough) and unleashes the hidden violent depths of Jon Hamm, the seeming professional of the crew. It all goes pear-shaped, people die, people are betrayed, all the cops are somehow both comically overweight but also able to engage in extended foot chases. And Baby manages to convince everyone that he is the good guy, despite killing several people directly and countless people indirectly. Just another piece of storytelling discord, as the story gives the audience zero reason to like Baby but then tells them to like him anyway because he’s the hero, damn it.
For an Edgar Wright film, Baby Driver is surprisingly charmless. Yes, it has 2 fun car chases. Yes, it has a deep and varied soundtrack. Baby manages to somehow be the most musically eclectic 20 year old in the history of cinema. His ear for every musical act from Queen to the Incredible Bongo Band is perhaps unlikelier than him being an amazeballs getaway driver with perfect recall of every street in Atlanta. Anyway, despite the car chases and the perfectly-timed musical cinematography sending NPR into the stratosphere of orgasmic delight, the movie also features a ton of shots that are supposed to be very meaningful and end up looking silly. Wright gets a lot of mileage out of Baby standing with his hands in his pockets, staring at something important like a housecat watching a fly. Except the housecat is an idiot and the fly has a sign on it that says “WATCH ME.” Lots of long shots of Jon Hamm staring with inscrutable emotions. Actors put their hands on their mouths to convey shock. That kind of thing.
It all just adds up to an unpleasant experience. Clearly, the draw of the film wasn’t meant to be the characters or the story. It was all meant to service the car scenes and the soundtrack. Which, fine. Everyone has Spotify now, everyone can dip in and out of musical choices without committing. It’s interesting that when Baby hears his love interest singing a tune, he runs to the record shop for some vinyl. Meanwhile, audiences are going to run home, stream half of this soundtrack and then get bored and go swipe right on something. Snide comments against millennials aside, it’s a mistake to base a movie around a soundtrack. If the music means nothing to the listener personally, then the entire things fails. Maybe, MAYBE, if Baby was super compelling character, the audience would connect to the songs because they mean something to him. But even he treats songs as unimportant in any sense except OCD (When jacking a car, he can’t leave until he finds something ANYTHING on the radio. He settles on “Radar Love.” There should be a version of this film where he refuses to drive because that song is so terrible and gets arrested.) So, if the movie is based around the music, and the protagonist treats music as unimportant except for filling time, what is this movie telling us about itself? That air conditioning is expensive so you may as well watch whatever is in the theater? Edgar Wright thanking viewers after the previews for seeing his movie “as it was intended” seems to say exactly that.
Baby Driver has been described as a musical with car chases instead of musical numbers. I recall the underrated (but still problematic) Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World being described as a musical with fights instead of songs. If Edgar Wright wants to make a good movie, maybe he should make a movie with a movie instead of a musical. If he just wants to make something that people wander into on a hot day and stop caring about before it ends, maybe he should make Baby Driver 2. The critics will hate it for being derivative, like they should have hated the first one.
