Baby Driver: Review

Baby Driver is one of those movies that everyone has been looking forward to and hyping up for a long time, but I was a little more hesitant to embrace it for reasons that are still relatively unknown to me. And now that it's finally out, everyone is gushing over it and I think that it's simply just good. It's The Driver, Theif, and Drive all wrapped up in a frenetic romantic dramedy action musical and while it may have familiar beats that it hits, it's frankly unlike most things out there.

When this film thrusts into its action sequences, it's a lot of fun and the use of music is as legendary as you've been hearing it is but I was emphatically disappointed by how unmoved I was by the car chases which have been hyped as some of the best ever. They're certainly cool but they never got my heart racing, at least not until the third act which is smaller in scale but more effective because of that decision. Spacey, Foxx, Hamm (especially Hamm), and James all fit their roles perfectly but my main gripe with the cast, and the film, in general, is the man that is in front and center of it all, Ansel Elgort. He has his moments of good physical acting but every time he delivered a line, it just felt so boring and flat and he brought absolutely no sense of personality to a character that I felt needed it.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed my time with Baby Driver. It's original, fun, hella entertaining, and in classic Edgar Wright fashion, the pop culture references are consistently pretty neat but I wanted it to do more for me. I wanted this film to make me feel things but it just didn't hit the right spots for me most of the time. However, the positives of the film outweigh my disappointed feelings pretty heavily. It's super well crafted and I could certainly see myself revisiting it somewhere down the line. It's a very cool movie but it never felt like more than that. (7.5/10)