"Baby Driver" is a high-wire, hyper-cool, adrenaline-fueled fusion of music, action and ecstasy. To be sure, there have been countless past heist pictures and plenty of movies driven by their soundtracks, but there has never been anything quite like what writer-director Edgar Wright (2010's "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World") has accomplished. Entirely original and intoxicatingly fluid, the film begins with a great lead character—one worthy of becoming iconic in the modern cinematic lexicon—and then gives him a talent behind the wheel and an array of iPods and sunglasses among his accessorized arsenal. Baby (Ansel Elgort), you see, was in a car accident as a child and suffers from tinnitus—"a hum in the drum," as crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) describes it. He began using music to drown it out, and now an endless playlist accompanies his life, as natural as eating and sleeping.
When a tune is playing, Baby feels like he can do just about anything. Anything, that is, except cut ties with Doc, the shady mastermind behind a wave of uncatchable Atlanta robberies. Decked out with a revolving door of thieves but only one constant—that would be Baby, who acts as his can't-fail getaway driver—he keeps the quirky young man tightly under his thumb. Baby wants none of it—he has fallen for diner waitress Debora (Lily James) and hopes to hit the open road with her—but his belief that he has paid his dues proves oh-so-wrong as Doc pulls him back in for their latest job of pilfering millions of dollars in money orders at the U.S. Post Office.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
