REVIEW

Intro: Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a talented getaway driver who relies on his personal soundtrack. After meeting Lily James, the woman of his dreams, he foresees an opportunity to ditch his shady lifestyle by making a clean break. But after being coerced into working for a crime supremo (Kevin Spacey), Baby must face the music as a doomed heist threatens everything he has been hoping for – his life, love and freedom.

Edgar Wright, the writer and film director of thrilling Baby Driver, hails from the quiet county of Somerset.

For someone who grew up in the shadow of the Mendip hills, and whose last film, The World’s End (2013), which was inspired by a teenage pub-crawl he once went on in Wells, it is a marvel how he has now created a roaringly high-octane and exhilarating 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.

Yet, we encounter scenes that are, so far, unoriginal. Wright makes a virtue of filling his film with plotlines so familiar they could almost be deemed clichés. Avid film watchers would’ve seen a million heists, car chasers, menacing Mr Bigs, and protagonists falling for sweet waitresses in diners, which is what happens here to Baby, as soon as he sets eyes on Debora (winningly played by Lily James).

She is the stereotypical dreamer and 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 deceased mother, who he keeps picturing in flashbacks. Another cliché.

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 Hills 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 he out-screeches the pursuing cops, even when he sits in on briefings for the next job, his constant companies are rock, R&B and disco music.

He even mixes his own tracks, secretly recording snatches of his accomplices’ conversations, then going home and turning them into his own, rather literal, version of gangsta rap.

Baby lives with his ageing, deaf foster father, Pops (CJ Jones), who knows the boy has a good heart but has fallen in with some dodgy characters.

And my, are they dodgy. Apart from Doc, they include a trigger-happy psycho called Bats (Jamie Foxx) and the scarcely less scary Griff (Jon Bernthal), neither of whom are comfortable in the company of the kid with the iPod fixation. Buddy (Jon Hamm) seems more congenial, but then he has a respectable background as a banker. Now he’s a gamekeeper turned poacher, on the run with his lap-dancer girlfriend, Darling (Eiza Gonzalez).

Wright keeps the action more real and less exuberantly comedic than in his most successful films, Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). He certainly doesn’t rein in the violence, which at times is gruesome and somewhat glorified. But his playful side is never far away, even when things start to look deeply worrying for Baby, who is forced into one final raid on a post office just when he thought he had paid his dues. Will he get to head west on 20 with lovely Debora, or will he have to face the music?

It is maybe best to say that it’s a blast and a joyride finding out. If you love car chases, you’ll love this movie; Wright choreographs them superbly. And if you love music, you’ll probably love this movie, too; the soundtrack features something for everyone, including Queen, T.Rex, The Beach Boys, The Damned, Dave Brubeck and, of course, singing the title song, Simon & Garfunkel.

Despite the plaudits and thunderous recommendation, others have pronounced the film as deeply disappointing, with ‘risible’ dialogue and ‘silly’ characterisations.

On this count, maybe Baby Driver is this season’s La La Land, for which the critical hosannas were so loud that some audiences went away unimpressed. But for this reviewer, I’ll offer and anoint the film with the full five stars.

Baby Driver (15)

Verdict: Exhilarating and high-octane ★★★★★