Baby Driver

The film stars Ansel Elgort as the titular character in deep with some undesirables from the criminal underworld. To pay them back, he must use his driving skills to help with a number of heists. During all this, he becomes smitten with a waitress (Lily James) who makes him feel like he's more than just a criminal. He then decides to try and escape his life of crime, but he soon realizes that it's much easier said than done.

I must say, Edgar Wright did a fantastic job with this film. All the music fit so well in their respective scenes, combined with the great acting all around to make one of the most entertaining films I've seen in a long time.

Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey, and Eiza González did their parts well and portrayed convincing mentally unstable killers. This is the first time Wright has worked with this much star power, specifically American star power. The actors played well off of each other, especially in scenes involving comedy where they nailed the punchlines.

The music was good, not all of it recognizable by the average viewer, but effective nonetheless. Supposedly Edgar Wright based the whole movie idea around the Baby Driver song by Simon & Garfunkel, which is an accomplishment all on it's own.

Baby Driver was paced well, was never boring, and made me want sit back down in my seat and watch it over again.

I wanted to keep this review kind of short, but I did want to give you enough information to hopefully convince you to go out and see this film if you get the chance.

My suggestion: Do yourself a favor, go enjoy a night out at the movies and go see Baby Driver!

Seen at a advance screening in Roseville, Minnesota.

Remember that movie you saw when you were a kid, and loved it? Loved it! Best movie ever! You told all your friends about it, the great music, the cool characters, the gear cars? You talked about it for years, for decades, and then it turned up again, so you dragged your family to see a cool movie that was done right. And as you sat through it for the second time, you wondered "What happened to the movie I saw when I was a kid? This is nothing at all like it! The lines are stupid, the music is lame and the actors are gargoyles! What happened to it?"

This is that movie. It's not the movie you saw, it's the movie you remembered. It's got great music and great cars that dance, and actors who behave like Steve MacQueen, and Kevin Spacey shoots the really bad guys -- not the bank robbers, those are the heroes, but the really bad guys, and says "I was in love once." Edgar Wright -- whom I know from the movies he directed Simon Pegg in -- has directed a gangster-car-chase-teen-love movie that does what Justin Lin, Guy Ritchie and those other hot directors tried to do, but could not. Yeah. This is the movie you remembered.

I read an early tweet that described Baby Driver as 'a mix-tape with a film attached to it' and that proved to be an accurate comment. The tweeter may have thought this was a good thing, but I certainly don't.

Yes, there are some good tracks and the action sequences are elaborate and frenetic (a little too frenetic, actually), but the characters are dull, unlikeable and bear very little relation to the real world. I simply did not believe in them, especially Darling, the sassy, kick ass stock character that only a fool would consider to be a strong female character.

Then there's Baby, whose laconic, boyish demeanour makes him a rather uninspiring protagonist. His romance with Debbie, a cute little waitress, is yawn-inducingly clichéd, too.

If you want a stylish heist film that isn't so bloody try-hard, then watch Drive. It's an exercise of style over substance much like this film, but it has suspense, atmosphere and characters that could actually exist rather than blaring music, mind-numbing action and flat, hateful comic book characters.

However Edgar Wright is a director that seems to get more immature as opposed to maturing with his audience as his films go on.

Baby Driver, a film idea that was, no doubt, pulled from a drawer of high concept, high-school ideas from Mr. Wright, has that sort of aged 90's Tarantino vibe, from the musical OTT dialogue, attention to soundtrack, and the Natural Born Killers style star-crossed main characters. Unfortunately that makes the idea very dated and the promise of a musical car-chase movie a bit of misdirection. It's more of a 90's gangster film with a painful hipster hand guiding it, interspersed with music videos made of car chases.

There's some humour, neat little ideas, satisfying and creative moments, but they're unpleasantly jammed in to a a few moulds that don't do some of the core concepts justice. Lily James is a delight but her character is shortchanged, the idea of replacing core characters for each job is nonsensical probably to get rid of actors to other commitments. And the less said about the two dimensional Darling and Kevin Spacey the better.

I somehow felt love and hate sort of feeling for Baby Driver. The movie started off on nice note but then somehow slows down and eventually picks up too much pace in second half. It's pretty hard to keep the interest alive all the time. I really loved the song selection and even noticed me nodding to few beats as well. The car action sequence were well shot too. But then the second half of the movie was so fast that it feels like they just wanted to end this but still wanted to keep it alive. Don't think if there was any need of few gruesome sequences.

The story had so much potential and having some good cast along, it could have gone to great heights. But it disappoints in this area and turns out to be just another mindless action drama for light viewing.