"Baby Driver" sure can carry a tune

Baby Driver is a musical action movie.
It’s not a musical. There aren’t any song and dance numbers. A kid tip-taps to a song, sure. Music animates things. Body language flows with a tune, windshield wipers keep rhythm, cars in pursuit coordinate in a dance, gun shots reinforce drum beats.
I’d watch its cold open over and over and over and over.
I wanted to love it. I just ended up liking it.
I think it’s Ansel Egort’s fault.
Kid’s got a sense of rhythm. Too bad it doesn’t seem like he can act — at least not beyond the Elvis voice he spends the movie doing. Being surrounded by greats does not help prop him up.
Jon Hamm is the most charismatic man in the gutter. Kevin Spacey manages to mix revolting oiliness with father figure. Lily James is delightful, lighting up every scene she’s in. Jamie Foxx is absolute raw meanness. Jon Bernthal is the very embodiment of the asshole tough guy you just want to see smacked around. Even Flea delivers the few lines he has with understated style
Not Egort. He has all the personality of a wet sheet of draft paper. You’d forget he was there at all it wasn’t because of how great a character Edgar Wright gave him.
That, and the fact he can dance. When he is mostly alone, or the camera is following him around to the rhythm popping out of his earbuds, it almost looks like he can make it. Thinking about it now, though, I wonder how much of that is him, and how much is the music selection doing his job for him.
Edgar Wright’s finger doesn’t stray from the movie’s pulse, and his music selection sets the tempo. He avoids the facile “greatest hits” approach Baz Luhrmann had with Moulin Rouge. I get the impression he picked tunes that had meaning for him. They might not be your songs but he’ll make them your soundtrack.
Wright brings us a smashing start, a delightful follow-up, but then the movie sputters out a bit. Color me surprised. This has got to be the first time I left a movie wishing they had worked in more chase sequences.
Yes, some jaw-dropping scenes ended on the trailer, but there’s still enough there to tap your feet to. Even if it sort of just… ends. Even some of the best tunes just fade out after they’ve wormed their way into your ear.
And you know — you just know — you’ll need to play them again.
Some day. Just not right now.
Originally published at filmsnark.tumblr.com.
