Man, Baby Driver Loves Just Being A Movie
In Baby Driver, everyone seems to know they’re in an action movie, and that’s the best thing about it. Consider what you’d do if you were making a movie about your life: You’d pick all your favorite songs to be on the soundtrack, you’d nail every line of dialogue, and you’d point the camera at everything that made you seem as cool as possible. That’s what the characters in Baby Driver do. As the action boils over and the stakes rise, everyone hustles around to make sure their every move, point, line, wink, gunshot, engine rev, and let’s-go nod is in tune with one badass, pedal-to-the-metal tune. It doesn’t matter if it’s a gimmick. It’s too much fun.
Baby Driver has a delightful one-sentence premises, something that usually indicates a good movie: A getaway driver with tinnitus drives criminals around to pay off his debt to a crime boss and skate town with the love of his life. The swerve is: To drown out the ringing in his ears, Ansel Elgort (he plays Baby) cycles through a collection of iPods, each jammed with a distinct collection of groove-tastic rock tunes. Whatever Baby plays functions as the movie’s soundtrack, and the result is a movie as aware of the musical cues as the audience is. Every time someone fires a weapon, quips a zinger, or sets cash down on the table, it’s in line with the relevant song’s blaring, bombastic tones.
The movie will probably be rewatched more in songs than in scenes. It’s destined for a dynamic where you walk in on someone else watching it and say something like “oh, is this the Bellbottoms part?” and settle in for a couple minutes. Taken as a whole, the movie misses a couple narrative beats—a consistent villain would make it even better, and while Lily James is lovely as Baby’s waitress love-interest Deborah, her writing is flat—but throw the story out and Baby Driver is chock full of shot-to-shot, moment-to-moment treats. There’s a lot of parts that make you smirk, nod, or give a tiny little fist pump.
It’s a joy to watch something that takes so much pride in just being a movie. It feels like the production process was full of decisions where director Edgar Wright and his crew had an idea, huddled up for a sec, and thought, screw it, let’s just try it. Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we timed the machinegun fire to the drum fills on this Queen song? Dude, it would be rad if when Baby takes one of his earbuds out, we change the sound in the theater so the music only plays from one side of the room. Yo, how many Commodores covers can we fit in here?
Sometimes, movies show their labor, and you can tell they took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make. Watching those can feel tiring, especially when the work didn’t pay off with any sort of creative breakthrough. Baby Driver, though, looks like it wasn’t anything but a total effing blast to put together. Edgar Wright had fun writing and directing it. The cast had fun chewing up their scenery. The editors had fun lining up all the sound effects. That’s such a cool thing, and as a viewer, it puts you in a complete state of ease. You can just sit back and watch without having to worry about things like plot mechanics or payoff; just hang on and enjoy the ride.
There’s been a lot of garbage so far this blockbuster season, and most of that garbage carries the stench of movies that had to work really, really hard. Transformers 5. Pirates of the Caribbean 5. The Mummy. Each of these movies carries the weight of obligations—they have to service a franchise or kick off “a new cinematic universe” or “complete the saga.” All those responsibilities make you want to do is sigh and prop your elbow on the armrest and lean your head against your hand. It’s summer; this is the time of year when we want to feel loose and free, not bogged down with expectations. When we walk into or out of those movies, we don’t feel like we’re taking a break. We feel like we completed a homework assignment, checked something off our to-do list. It’s not just that those movies suck; the idea of those movies suck.
Baby Driver doesn’t suck because Baby Driver takes so much joy in what it is. It’s free to hop in, floor it, and pound the jams all the way down the highway. Amid a long, hot summer, that’s a essential feeling. It’s special that a movie can exude liberation these days, and it’s even more special that for two hours, Baby Driver can make you feel liberated, too.