As the titular young hero in Edgar Wright's new action/comedy/romance Baby Driver, Ansel Elgort - with his dark sunglasses and his iconic white iPod earphones - spends the majority of the movie letting everyone else do the talking while he mostly listens. That is, until he meets a charming waitress by the name of Deborah (Lily James) and gets smitten with her completely. Such is the fate of a young genius behind the wheel whose favorite past time is recording people's conversations and creating music out of them.
Wright has always been an original, exciting filmmaker (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scot Pilgrim vs The World), and here he infuses his typical kinetic style with plenty of good music and some original writing to produce a movie that is equal parts Drive, Fast and the Furious, and pretty much any Michael Mann heist flick. The likes of Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx play charismatic villains to Elgort's thug-with-a-heart-of-gold Baby, but the movie, which is a lot of fun, simply recycles way too many cliches ("this is my last job", "the girl is his weakness", etc) of thieves-behind-a-wheel genre in order to be truly great. But don't let that keep you from seeing it, because it's still very good as is.
B
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