Writer-director Edgar Wright, already an established master at upending junky genres with massive doses of adrenalin and self-referential gags ("Hot Fuzz", "Shaun Of The Dead"), pushed all the right buttons here......
Wright seized on a timeworn noir trope...... the distanced, non-verbal, supernaturally talented getaway driver maintaining his cool while forced to work with a woeful bunch of hot-tempered, stupid and psychotically violent criminal douchebags. (Ryan O'Neal, Steve McQueen and Ryan Gosling have all had a go at this character in, respectively, "The Driver", "The Getaway" and "Drive"...)
Pumping up the story and volume, Wright gives his driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort) a hearing impairment and a permanent addiction to Ipod tunes as the kid spectacularly evades fleets of pursuing cop cars.
And in the film's most self-celebratory technique, all of the action sequences' cacophonous noise (gunshots, cars doors, etc) is perfectly timed to the beats of Baby's Ipod songs......
Exhilarating? For sure. For three quarters of its running time, "Baby Driver" is an unequivocal blast.....a pure rush. And for those of us who miss the simple joys of "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs", Wright remembers to throw in a motormouthed coterie of scumbags, headed up by the ever smooth, slimy and soon-to-be-forgotten Kevin Spacey (.....probably your last chance to watch Spacey in a film where his scenes won't be re-shot with another actor......since all his future audiences will consist mostly of fellow rehab group therapy attendees... )
Also much fun for all: the actors playing Spacey's various live-wire cohorts (Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal, Eliza Gonzalez.....each of them a human grenade, waiting for the right pin-pull moment to explode. And anyone who remembers the 70's will smile with delight at the surprise cameo by the diminutive actor-singer-songwriter Paul Williams, turning up as a gun dealer in one of those inevitable empty warehouse confabs gone horribly wrong.....
Speaking of things gone horribly wrong.......
Edgar Wright, like the BQ, must have sat through countless DVDs and Blu-Rays that offered the filmmakers' multiple alternate endings as a special feature......
Sorry to say.....the film's final third looks like Wright decided not to save his alternate endings for the Blu-Ray.......instead, it appears he unwisely incorporated all his alternate endings into the film itself.
"Baby Driver"s climax lurches exhaustingly from one possible finish to another......turning the film from a fizzy party into a weary, self-indulgent slog from a director who can't make up his mind. By the time the film finished punishing both us and the characters, the arrival of the credits filled us more with a sense of relief than satisfaction.
But through most of it, we enjoyed the ride.....until the film literally drowned in its own excess. So we'll hit the gas for 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).....which we would've bumped to a full 4 if only Edgar Wright found a way to keep this high-wire act going from start to finish......
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