K-SCORE: 68
Writer/Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Bernthal, Lily James
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“they have Baby, a well-established driver, just running away from cops and criminals alike on foot”
The difference between a pretty good heist film and a pretty bad heist film is that in a pretty good heist film the last scene of the movie is the best one. In a pretty bad heist film, the first scene is the best scene. Baby Driver, unfortunately, is the latter.
It’s not just the first scene. The entire film has a lot of potential in its characters and thematics. The small hit and run criminal gangs run by Kevin Spacey’s character, Doc, are generic and uninteresting right off the Bats, but the other stuff has to get worse over time. Baby is tremendously likable right from the start despite being a getaway driver. It’s not just that he’s amazing at what he does. He’s light-hearted and happy, dancing and listening to music, goofily skipping to a coffee shop, content with his ipod and never-ending supply of sunglasses. Yet as soon as he walks into a diner and meets a girl he’s in love with, who of course takes to him instantly as well, he becomes a grump. From then on it’s all flashbacks and dead parents. His backstory is a little generic, but the idea of an orphan who got good at stealing cars and driving away from police and thus became entwined with a criminal overlord isn’t the films problem. The problem is a lack of definition in any of the other characters. Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal, and that vampire stripper from From Dusk Til Dawn all play maniac robbers who lack forward-thinking skills. Foxx’s character is guilty of an all-too-common infraction of embodying what shall henceforth be known as the Shootable Psycho! This is when, in a gang of criminals, renegade survivalists, post-apocalyptic wanderers, or cube-trapped victims, there is one member who behaves like a violent, counter-productive, unreasonable, madman asshole. Yet since the group is already operating beyond the confines of normal society, it makes little sense for one of the more reasonable people to not just murder the shit out of him. Inevitably this happens eventually, (Baby Driver is no exception), but rarely do any of the others have the foresight to insert some lead into this lunatic BEFORE he wreaks havoc. Always I’m watching these Shootable Psychos and left to wonder how they survived long enough to even garner a reputation for being unstable and prone to betrayal. Partly here the problem is in Foxx’s performance and partly the character is not written to be very interesting. Same goes for Kevin Spacey, who has shoehorned in every role since The Usual Suspects. He read the script and went “Doc? Whatever. What about the young gaffers that’ll be on set?” (Too soon?) Hamm is okay until his wifey suicides by cop. Then he transforms into a slasher villain. And Eiza Gonzalez simply isn’t a talented actress. She’s does a damn-fine pole dance in lingerie with a snake coiled around her neck though.
“Small mistakes mount and the whole thing comes off the rails.”
Worse than these character malformations is the plotting. The story functions in some ways, yet goes very wrong in far too many others. None of the little heists of banks and a post office are cleverly planned with the exception of one car-switching trick they use three times. None of the characters suit these plots because they don’t require specialized skills. Doc’s enterprise of crooked criminals and crooked cops is ill-defined such that one never knows who enemies and allies are, but instead there is a vague impression of corruption and villainy. The initial debt to Doc development serves a compelling purpose in keeping Baby hooked to the crimes, and then it’s ruined when Doc reneges on his repayment offer and ropes Baby back in and then further ruined when they try to make Doc into a sympathetic character when he finds out about Baby’s relationship with Debora. By the end, they have Baby, a well-established driver, just running away from cops and criminals alike on foot. The details of the whole thing become harder and harder to follow. Small mistakes mount and the whole thing comes off the rails.
The biggest missed opportunity though is in the thematic work. There’s a plot-link to the music of the film and a reason it plays constantly. Baby has tinnitus and listens to songs to drown out a ringing. This ties in perfectly with a non-angsty, happy-go-lucky, dancing, sunglasses-wearing, live-for-the-drive Baby, but not so much with the one we see in the latter two-thirds of the movie. It, along with the cool getaway car chases, is what makes the movie viscerally enjoyable. It’s the appeal. It also would have been very powerful if the moment the crime film took a serious turn was at the climax and then that was the only point when Baby lost his music. After he overcomes that climax, he could put his music back in, maybe even playing the songs his mom sang. The sunglasses could have been a thing he always has on with tons of backup pairs and then right at the worst moment, when the sun is actually blinding him on the road, he could find himself without a pair. Yet Edgar Wright and company clearly didn’t think of it, and like the rest of the movie, the motifs get muddled.
Does no one remember the Ryan Gosling film Drive? We’ve already done this and made these mistakes before. To go from Drive to Baby Driver in eight years doesn’t bode well for the progress films are making these days.