Baby Driver is a nerdy genre movie. It’s sort of like a know-it-all guy named Dexter wearing Arthur Fonzarelli’s leather jacket to trivia night at the pub. It looks cool at first, but the coolness doesn’t hold up to inspection. It was borrowed and tacked on. Underneath it, there’s still Dexter, and he’s still a dork. Just one who is well-read on the topic of cool.
This is a getaway movie built on a foundation of old ideas: the titular wheel man (Ansel Elgort) has been shaped by the death of his mother just like virtually every other well-intentioned rebel; he has to drive for “one more job” to be free of his debt to the crime lord; and he lives with and cares for a wise old black man, this time a deaf mute who gives him heartfelt advice via sign language. You see, he’s not a common criminal, but someone with a good heart who yearns for the love of a pretty waitress (Lily James) antagonized by her mean boss.
No doubt writer-director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim, Shaun of the Dead) loaded up clichés on purpose. Maybe it’s in tribute to pulpy trash , or maybe it’s because story doesn’t mean shit to this movie. The thin story is his dorky bookworm platform, and he slaps a leather jacket and shades onto it.
Here’s the problem with that: The movie’s titular Baby is a young man, and Edgar Wright’s an old man. I’m sure it’s comforting to tell yourself that kids will still think your shit’s cool, but it does both you and them a disservice.
This is Hollywood’s problem in general: it’s a business run by insecure middle-aged men still desperate to be cool. They aren’t keeping up, they don’t know what the kids like unless the kids tell them. And even then, they don’t care. They want validation that they’re still cool.
They’re not. Maybe they were cool way back when. But they aren’t now. Now they’re just cockblocking kids from hearing all of today’s great music.
Baby Driver is stuffed with more old music than Candy Bottoms’ mouth was with dicks in her classic film “Esophagus Hunter.” The thing about rock and roll, though, is it’s ephemeral. Yesterday’s sound is vaporized by the next wave. What follows might or might not be better, but that’s beside the point. The point is rock and roll should always be the sound of a generation. That’s the whole fucking point. But the old men with the keys to power think they’ll stay relevant, or that they know better, by shoving their shit down the throats of youth.
In the real world, the movie’s Baby might listen to some old music, but not almost entirely old stuff. Not the Blues Explosion, Focus, Jonathan Richman, Beck, the Damned, T. Rex and Queen. Those were cool in their time, but that’s the past. And if that is what Edgar Wright wants, he should do the same as all the other old guys who want everyone to know they are cool do: go see those old bands play, and stand right in front of the stage to let everyone know you still get in the mosh pit, but then just be motionless holding your iPhone to video it as proof that you were there. That’s what aging phonies do around here.
The music is supposed to amp up the cool of a dozen car chases, and of tough guys chomping their teeth. The car scenes are entertaining enough, but they largely play like very expensive music videos. And while the car crashes and shootouts are technically adept, they aren’t really that new.
Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm play greasy fuckers who don’t smile and tense their muscles a lot. They might be doing a hell of a good job acting. I Don’t know. All I know is their characters aren’t that interesting under the leather jackets. Same with Kevin Spacey as the Big Cheese. It’s pretty damn one note with almost no surprises. As for Ansel Elgort, I felt pretty embarrassed for him every time he had to pretend to be singing along with some song written before he was born.
The movie toys with trying to make Baby a good guy, but that is drown out in a hail of blood and bullets that muddies everything. By the end it is hard to know what the fuck to think, or who to root for. Basically, Wright is so obsessed with style that he chucks the storyteller in the crapper. Which left me looking at a dork on the screen. He might know the history of pulp and getaway movies, but that leather jacket sure as hell ain’t his, and it went out of style twenty years ago. Two Fingers for Baby Driver.