'Baby Driver' Brings The Tunes Fit For One Heck Of A Ride
- Starring Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Eiza González
- Rated R
- Action
- Directed by Edgar Wright
- Run Time - 1 hour, 53 minutes
- In theaters June 28, 2017
What happens when you take elements of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and a musical and put them in a blender?
Baby Driver.
It's an action movie with some serious style and a killer soundtrack. It's a visual album. It's a crime story with a romantic undercurrent. And somehow, it has just enough of each to make it all work.
The music doesn't overstay its welcome, each actor gets their moments to shine and the plot has just enough twists and turns to make the movie seem much shorter than its almost-two-hour time stamp.
Lily James and Ansel Elgort manage to sell a legitimate love story even without it being the focus for the better part of the film and every 'thug' in this movie, while not exactly multidimensional, is more than able to draw your attention and interest at every second.
The incorporation of music, however, is easily Baby Driver's biggest strength. It utilizes the many strengths of a musical, marrying the background and movements to the beat of the soundtrack, and all but turns the tunes into a character in and of itself. It can sell an emotional moment, amp up an action sequence and add dimension to a main character that hardly says much of anything.
If you like Tarantino but think he's too bloody, if you enjoy Ritchie but think it's a bit too jumbled and if you would appreciate a musical if it just had a bit more of an edge to it, it'd be a waste to not take this one in on the big screen.