Rent Baby Driver (2017)

DJ’s review is spot on - Baby Driver review by Old Devonian

This is rock solid good. So what if it is a carton caper and Baby’s back story is slightly ridiculous. The car chases are great and the twists and turns worth the wait. Baby is an interesting character and, together with the soundtrack, make the movie different and very entertaining. Definitely 110 minutes we’ll spent.

Heists and romance to irritating music - Baby Driver review by Alphaville

A boy racer drives a heist getaway car while grooving to 50s-type rock-and-roll muzak. This is intended to be cool. Spoiler: it isn’t.

The movie is a lightweight time-passer that moves along snappily enough, but the incessant muzak really irritates. Director Edgar Wright first had the idea for the film 22 years ago and the soundtrack’s even older. He’s responsible for it. He needs to upgrade his musical tastes.

Overall it’s yet another distasteful caper movie that, lacking Tarentino-esque dialogue, views robbery and murder as nothing more than funky fun. Critics who rated it need to look at themselves. The DVD extras also irritate, offering nothing but a hagiography of the director.

Delivers - Baby Driver review by AM

Someone I know has a film rating method where he starts with 10/10 and knocks off 1 point for each fault. If a film sets out to be an action movie, and it delivers that flawlessly, it's a 10/10 action movie, etc.

Baby Driver is a heist movie with a smile on it's face. It delivers that pretty much perfectly. Kevin Spacey phones in a Kevin Spacey performance so I dock a point on my friends rating. My own rating method means I can't give a heist movie full points as I'm highly unlikely to watch it again. But I'd recommend this film without a seconds thought.

Heist movie but not as you know it - Baby Driver review by LG

OK any film that begins with Bellbottoms by The John Spencer Blues Explosion gets extra kudos and thankfully this gem keeps on giving... the central character goes by the name of Baby for the most part, with a his backstory intertwined, a good soul who has lost his way... a story that ultimately veers to more theatrical but in a good way, nothing terribly deep here just plain fun... nice chase scenes and camera work, Edgar Wright has lots right and full credit for what he has come up with here... a solid effort...

Hugely disappointing - Baby Driver review by Dax Williams

The only reason this got 2 stars instead of 1 is that I have to admit the film looks good and there are well choreographed scenes. The car chases are well done; they are wildly unrealistic, but then so are most movie car chases. That is the problem with the movie - its all style. Especially annoying is that the film was written and direct by Edgar Wright, a massively talented filmmaker. Yes, Baby Driver has a cool soundtrack, but that alone is not good filmmaking.

I'm a fan of Wright (Hot Fuzz in particular) but he really dropped the ball with this one. The storyline is both wildly unbelievable and yet not remotely interesting and features a cast of cartoon-like characters that lack any kind of depth or intrigue. Spacey is some kind of criminal kingpin but there is no explanation of who he is, why he is powerful and why we should care. He organises robberies of banks/post offices by armed 4 person units (seriously, in 2017); one of these robberies involves a Mike Myers joke that should have been deleted as soon as the scriptwriter sobered up. A massively under written romantic plot features the beautiful Lily James playing an apparently lonesome waitress who falls for our bore of a 'hero' for no reason. She works in an almost empty cafe in a built up urban area that I'm sure would be full of leering men in real life. Oh and James is doing an accent, I think she was going for 'American' but I can't be sure. The other crew members are buffoonish idiots/thugs (Gonzalez seems to be there just to look hot) and Foxx has way too many 'slick' on liners that sound like they were written by a 14 year old who has just seen Pulp Fiction for the first time. Why would Spacey's character pick these nobs to carry out his oh-so-clever robberies? Also the police appear to give up solving these crimes after 10 minutes of a car chase.

I have seen worse movies but not more annoying movies. The 'Baby' character was not sympathetic despite his laughable sob story - the film is far too smug with it's coolness for me to give a toss about any of it. This is also not helped by the fact that lots of the movie just doesn't make any sense. Without going into spoilers, there is a scene in a multi-storey car park towards the end that left me open-jawed and not in a good way. It was plain ridiculous. Over all, a big shame.

All Style - Baby Driver review by JH

Very much an Edgar Wright film - blazing eclectic soundtrack, wham-bam zippy high-def superhero-style cartoon action scenes and yet zero substance with the predilections of a bored teenager.

The introduction, with their shticky choreographed-to-the-music with CGI overlays fascination, and Baby's ultra slick driving getaway for a bank heist, is entertaining enough as a distraction but not something that especially engaged me.

And this remains it's problem as it attempt to deliver some kind of build up to the expectedly hyper 3rd act.

The music-sync thing rather forgotten and Baby, whom it is implied is happy to drive getaway and has been for a while before the start of the film, moves on his conscious.

The reasonable cast of actors have little to work with however when they are called upon. Space is vaguely threatening in his few scenes, Hamm a psycho in love (a la Clyde), Foxx annoying and Gonzalez a gun-toting Bonnie for a couple of scenes - in all, a set of barely two-dimensional characters.

The denouement, where Baby forgets the cars and suddenly opts for the gun, a little bit the desperado (but hey, he's a good kid), is utterly ludicrous and like something out of a DC film.

Stylish yes but utterly forgettable and not remotely engaging or well written.

Baby Driver, Adult Movie - Baby Driver review by CP Customer

Great soundtrack, and not as I'd thought, dominating the whole movie. A better plot line than I'd expected, and I enjoyed it more than expected too.

It's not art of course, and character depth is somewhat lacking in the women's roles - and you could argue the central characters themselves play cipher or caricatures of good/bad guys. But it is made with an artistic eye and is good to watch.

The end is a bit twee, but hey, at least we're not left wondering what happened next