‘Baby Driver’:
A bank robbery and car chase kick off a genuinely exhilarating film.
“Baby Driver” feels new. It’s an action film with some traceable ancestry in Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino movies, but the attitude is different here, and so is the emphasis on style. Music plays a big part in this Edgar Wright film — sometimes too big a part — but it also helps charge some intense scenes with an extra blast of energy.
Most car chases are boring. They have no drama because the audience knows that the protagonist can’t get caught. So what does Wright do? He begins “Baby Driver” with a chase — actually a bank heist followed by a car chase — and he delivers one of the most exhilarating sequences of the summer. It’s a wonderful thing that can’t happen often enough, the realization that a director knows ex-
actly what he’s doing, that a movie is in good hands. With “Baby Driver,” we know that within about one minute.
Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a young genius among getaway drivers. He has tinnitus, and so he listens to music all day to drown out the ringing in his ears. This sonic field keeps him at a distance from others and gives him a zone of mental safety. We experience the opening scene, a bank robbery, from inside Baby’s head. The music overcomes the sound of the robbery and of the subsequent chase, which is brilliantly imagined and choreographed. Wright places Baby and his fellow bank robbers in a hopeless situation and delights us with how he gets them out.
We soon discover that Baby is not some hard-boiled character. He has been enlisted into this work because he is paying off a debt to Doc (Kevin Spacey), a powerful crook whose specialty is putting together bank heists. He doesn’t rob banks himself. He devises robbery plans and, for each job, assembles a crew of freelancers. The only consistent cast member is Baby, because he’s that good, and because Doc regards him as his good-luck charm.
As the movie begins, Baby is hoping to go straight, but then Doc says, “Your waitress girlfriend is cute. Let’s keep it that way.” Kevin Spacey says the line as you might imagine he would, calmly, with his odd mix of ironic humor, long-suffering weariness and complete dead seriousness. So Baby knows that driving for him is no summer job but a life sentence.
Wright leans a bit too heavily on the soundtrack at times, particularly about a quarter of the way into the movie. The creation of some distance during the robbery and chase scenes produces an interesting effect, but we don’t need any additional distance as the emotional terms of the story are being laid out for us. Fortunately, at a certain point, Wright eases off a bit, and we settle into the movie’s clear-cut setup.
It couldn’t be more simple: Baby wants out. Baby can’t get out. Baby is going to try anyway, especially now that he has a new girlfriend, a diner waitress played by Lily James. Her dream is the same as his, to start driving west (they’re in Atlanta) and just never stop.
In the meantime, Doc is putting together another job, and the crew has some serious talent: Jamie Foxx as an explosive character who dislikes Baby on sight, Jon Hamm as a more even-keeled sociopath, and Eiza González as Hamm’s muchyounger girlfriend, who is as scary as she is beautiful, and that’s very scary. Wright’s characters lack the lunacy of Tarantino’s characters, and his scenes don’t have the same verbal pyrotechnics, but his characters are extreme enough, and his scenes have an undercurrent of tension, the sense that things might turn violent at any moment.
“Baby Driver” is a caper movie and a style piece, and it doesn’t go much deeper than that. But having hooked us with style, Wright knows he has to deliver on the story, and he does. His plotting is tight and fluid, wild and ultimately satisfying. It’s the ultimate cliche to compare a movie to a thrill ride, but sometimes the cliche applies.
Anyway, Wright may have been aiming for the cliche. If he did, he’s earned it.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle