Baby Driver (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #29 extract: Baby Driver (2017)

An ok film with significant problems in regards to character and story that left everything feeling rather hollow. 

With Baby Driver, Wright constructs an action-romance-musical with strong sound montage, highly stylised camera movement, some impressive chase scenes and mise en scène that is in constant conversation with the striking cinematography. For this, Baby Driver is a fun movie from a pretty good director. Unfortunately, Wright fails to integrate his style into story and character like he did so well in Scot Pilgrim. In such, the exposition and backstories are annoying, the dialogue is often grating, the bit-part caricatures are sometimes exasperating and the main characters are all throw-away meat sacks who carry no real presence. Dotted throughout are a few nice moments of comedy, but nothing pays off - especially the plotting. I thought there'd be more to this in terms of plot twists that'd make up for bad character writing, and hoped for some kind of substance in the story, but the script failed to deliver. 

All in all, not worth complaining about too much, it's just a shame that this couldn't work better as the approach to the action-musical was sometimes ingenious.