HANG ON FOR A JOYRIDE Brian Viner

Fast, furious and with a killer soundtrack, this gripping get-away caper gives Tarantino a run for his money . . .

EDGAR WRIGHT, the writer and director of the thrilling Baby Driver, hails from the sleepy South West England county of Somerset.

And it seems kind of marvellous that a fellow whose last film, 2013’s The World’s End, was inspired by a teenage pub crawl he once went on in the Somerset town of Wells, has now created a roaringly highoctane crime movie reminiscent of the best of Quentin Tarantino.

Baby Driver is set in Atlanta, Georgia. Its hero is a fresh-faced getaway driver, nicknamed Baby (Ansel Elgort), whose job is to whisk ruthless, armed bank robbers from the scene of their latest heist.

This he does brilliantly, but he is a reluctant participant, coerced into high-stakes crime by a gangster called Doc (Kevin Spacey), as payback for once trying to steal Doc’s car.

So far, so unoriginal. Indeed, Wright makes a virtue of filling his film with plotlines so familiar they almost count as clichés. We’ve all seen a million cinematic heists, car chases, menacing Mr Bigs, and protagonists falling for sweet waitresses in diners, which is what happens here to Baby, as soon as he set eyes on Debora, winningly played by Lily James.

She is a dreamer, a romantic, whose ambitions extend no further than heading west ‘on 20, in a car we can’t afford, with a plan we don’t have’. And she reminds Baby of his dead mother, who — another cliché — he keeps picturing in flashbacks.

So what turns the clichéd and commonplace into virtues? It’s the way Wright, sometimes obviously, sometimes with deft subtlety, references other films. There are repeated nods to Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, for example, and to Walter Hill’s 1978 film The Driver. The Pixar animation Monsters, Inc. actually gets a namecheck.

And when Baby loses one lens from his sunglasses during a getaway, Wright plainly intends it as a homage to Warren Beatty’s character in the iconic ambush scene from Bonnie And Clyde. But there is something else, something more that stops this film looking stylish, but essentially derivative, and makes it excitingly, enticingly original. It is, in a word, music.

Baby has been left with tinnitus from a childhood road accident that killed both his parents. He drowns it out by plugging his iPod into his ears, turning his life into one long playlist.

When he waits outside banks for Doc’s ever-rotating crew, when