I've never really been able to put a finger on it, but I have this thing where I'll see a trailer or an advert for a movie and think to myself that it definitely needs to go on the list and I need to see it; I will then successfully avoid seeing that movie for that sake of being disappointed. I don't know if anyone else does this at all, let alone regularly enough to mention it to an Internet literally throbbing at the seems with all manner of unforgiving trolls, miscreants and ne'er-do-wells. This crippling fear of a potentially good movie ending up crap has been somewhat mitigated by this blog recently because if it is crap at least I get to rant about it, but this is stuff I kind of know I'll enjoy; John Wick 2, Stranger Things 2, and critically the subject of today's awful Pantera-based title pun (it helps loads if you hum the tune).
Since the dawn of home video (and even more so now Amazon and Netflix started bankrolling their own original content), people have launched their personal finances into deep pits of doom for the sake of getting whatever terrible vanity project they have going on into the eyeballs of poor, witless idiots willing to risk sticking their arm into the bargain bin at Blockbuster's (RIP) and hoping the Tree Beast from Flash Gordon hadn't fallen on hard times since developers moved into Arboria and flattened his habitat to make way for a luxury High Rise and some grazing land for cattle. Follow your dreams kids, obviously, but don't be surprised if it all goes tits up when your parents accidentally open your credit card statement and fall into a deep, catatonic and permanent sense of abject disappointment. This is of course not always the case; although it might not be the most glamorous yardstick by which to measure true success, over here in the UK, getting your Mum to appear in one of your movies is probably a good indicator you're not a complete scrub, at least in their eyes.
All of which leads me in a very roundabout way to Baby Driver. Because of course it does.
I will admit to being a fan of Edgar Wright, even to the point where I didn't hate The World's End, despite it clearly being the least immediately enjoyable of the Cornetto Trilogy and like many, I would have loved to have seen his fully formic, sorry formed, Ant Man. Ant puns, at this hour on a Monday you say? The fun literally never stops. So Baby Driver got love from basically all quarters and despite genuinely wanting to see it at the cinema, somehow I didn't manage to. That was probably not a great move on my part because it's an absolute riot.
Essentially, Baby Driver is a heist movie that isn't really about the heist; in fact it's really both very literally and metaphorically about the getaway. You may have seen any number of films where the protagonist is trying to get out and they keep dragging him back in, but actually that doesn't matter so much here because it's the characters that are the core of the plot. Wright has a real knack for making the unlikely both central and sympathetic; Shaun [of the Dead], Scott Pilgrim, the main guy from World's End (do your research man, for the love of all that's holy*). Here, it's as much the unlikeable that we invest in; Kevin Spacey is a horrendous dick (although what manipulative mob boss isn't?) but he still finds a modicum of redemption towards the end. You can't help but feel a bit sorry for John Hamm losing his equally deranged better half, even though he's clearly a nut job, placing the blame in all the wrong places and not dealing with his loss in a way that's particularly healthy for anyone. I even felt a bit sorry for the hapless underling who ends up in the trunk of a car with significant chunks of his sternum missing just because he dropped his shotgun. Bless him. Clumsiness clearly not tolerated in the grand larceny community.
The real triumph of Baby Driver is that it is a object lesson in considered and intelligent filmmaking without slipping into the terminally dull and self-serving realms of Academy consideration. Visually frenetic without ever resorting to endless shaky-cam zooms and blurry close-ups, this feels like a graphic novel come to life; thankfully not so much in a primary-coloured spandex way, but more like a light hearted cousin to Shyamalan's Unbreakable. This is not part of the slew of superheroes working its way divisively into our cinemas and is all the more refreshing for it. Baby is a hero for sure; a genuinely good guy stuck in a genuinely bad situation after (sort of) receiving his special powers in a childhood accident. It's almost as if Wright is sticking an eloquent middle finger up at his erstwhile bosses at Marvel and telling them that they aren't the only ones who can do Superhero movies that aren't Superhero movies. His Ant Man would have been great, I'm totally convinced.
Special mention has to go to the music. James Gunn showed us all the Guardians of the Galaxy that a well chosen set of songs can be just as effective as a traditional score and Wright takes it one stage further by almost making the songs a character in their own rights. If the lyrics aren't appearing in graffiti and on posters as we hear them, bullets and explosions are seamlessly beat-matching to prog rock. I'm not entirely sure when Hocus Pocus became the de rigeur backing track for gun battles, but even with a yodelling section midway though (boy, you have to love the seventies for oddball musical experimentation) it works. Even Baby's mash-ups serve as a plot device without really drawing attention to that fact. The word genius gets bandied about all too much, but honestly this might be as close as you get.
I'm a bit gutted I never got to see/hear Baby Driver it on a big old Dolby surround sound rig, but life goes on. Even on a small screen it's well worth the watching.
*Gary King. Thank you IMDb.
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