This is pretty good and fun and if you ignore all the fanboy reviews and you'll probably have fun. But as someone who has been following Wright's career for 13 years now, I have to say that his films have never quite caught up to his talent. Shaun still stands as his best by a mile, and as his skills behind the camera have grown he's been increasingly hamstrung by his films, particularly the Pegg collaborations. World's End was the low point of their collaboration's diminishing returns as Wright is ready to cut loose behind the camera and choreograph insane fight sequences, but without a script or characters that support them. (Why does Nick Frost know how to fight like Neo again?)
Scott Pilgrim I have different issues with, it seemed like a perfect match for his sensibilities and visually it's still pretty great, inventive, etc. but narratively and as a comedy I have a hard time with it. As a fan of the books, I've returned to the film 4 or 5 times over the years just to LOOK at (and see if I've softened on it) but usually end up coming away with the same criticisms. Mainly that Cera isn't miscast per se, but just plays the role wrong (he's too timid for the character) and that the stylization makes it fun to watch but saps the drama and comedy away from the "normal" scenes when they should've been presented more or less as real world stuff and then the fights break out into Wright-land fantasia. Anywho.
Baby Driver is a great concept for Wright to cut loose on. He's clearly grown as a filmmaker over the years, learning to less obviously ape from Bay with quotation marks and just start to follow his own muse. But the film has some issues that hold it back from greatness for me.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.
- If you're shooting a movie whose main attribute is the style of the piece, for the love of God, do not shoot in fucking Atlanta. It's booooring as fuck. Wright wrote for LA, which looks great obvy in Drive and The Driver. Baby Driver starts at a major handicap right off the bat, because Atlanta (unless you're making a movie or show ABOUT Atlanta, like Atlanta) is boring as fuck. See: all Marvel films from the last 5 years.
- The idea that the hero has to listen to music in order to drown out the hum in his ears caused by the accident that killed his parents is a great setup. Unfortunately the movie does nothing with it dramatically. The film is wall-to-wall music, which sounds cool except almost none of the sequences rise to the occasion of being worthy of the song it's scored to. Because it's just EVERYWHERE, it all blends together into something that has no peaks and valleys. There is one cute moment where he gets into a new car and can't start driving until he finds a good song on the radio which does the most with this idea. It's fun. But it doesn't have any real dramatic function in the film. And thus, the hero essentially has no arc. Which makes it kinda boring.
DIGRESSION: Here's my small rewrite that solves this issue: he has to drown out the hum in his ear because whenever he isn't listening to music he's forced to focus on the ringing, which always brings him back to his mothers death which he feels partly responsible for (maybe they got in a fight or he distracted her with his ipod music mashups or something). So it is essentially his way of not dealing with the trauma of his childhood. And for all the chases in the film, where he must be completely focused, each one is scored to a song. However something happens to his ipod for the final getaway, it gets broken or something, and he has to do the entire chase in silence, and the film takes away the score, both differentiating it and upping the dramatic stakes. You can even throw in some flashes to his mom for drama. And then once he completes it he learns that he doesn't NEED the music, he can face his past. Right? Why did something like this not happen?
- The ending is unearned. Instead of coming up with a plan to outsmart the other dudes, why does he just go along with it and then go to prison? I get it's the unexpected thing to do, but again, dramatically it doesn't really make sense. He's been blackmailed by these dudes essentially that he has to be their driver, so why not have some agency and fuck them over instead of just turning yourself in for something that you weren't entirely responsible for?
- Lily James is cute and charming and unfortunately a placeholder for where an actual character should go. She doesn't even have a tragic/sympathetic backstory to explain why the hell she is cute, single and waiting for this weirdo to take her out of Atlanta.
- Kevin Spacey, we've seen him do this before. Ditto Jamie Foxx. And why was Hamm the last man standing and Spacey turns around to not be a prick? The law of action movies says "have a good bad guy that we want to see get dead." Not sure why they pulled the switch and made it Hamm, someone he had no beef with, and not Spacey, who was manipulating him into doing this in the first place. It's FINE. It's just odd.
- He makes these little mix tapes sampling people and then again, the film does nothing with it! Why isn't the entire film him driving around to these fucking remixes that he's made himself? Would've made the entire score memorable instead of just an oldies jukebox and dramatically tied the tapes back into the score. Also: the fact that this movie trots out Beck's Debra as a major plotpoint and then gives them a weak-ass half-scene to score it to, is a major fail. #RescueDebra
- The name reveal is kinda an eye-roll. (Why was he telling unrelated waitresses his bank robber code name instead of his real name?)
There's more I'm sure. But I went in wanting to love it. And so did the theatre full of 200+ nerds who paid $28 a ticket to see Kid Koala spin beforehand and just wanted to have a blast, but the theatre was pretty quiet. Which is a shame, because you want a movie like this to be full of fuck yeah moments that make you raise your fist and cheer, but it just couldn't quite engineer them.
Again, it's not a bad movie, it's still prob Wright's 2nd or 3rd best movie, but it's just a disappointment because you know he SHOULD be making great movies instead of pretty good ones.
