Baby Driver (2017) Review

Baby Driver Review

Director: Edgar Wright

Screenwriter: Edgar Wright

Producer: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, and Nira Park

Starring: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jamie Fox, and Jon Hamm

Composer: Steven Price

Cinematographer: Bill Pope

Editors: Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss

Production Companies: Big Talk Productions, Working Title Films, and Media Rights Capital

Part I: Introduction

As a fan of Edgar Wright's directorial work, I was pretty excited for his latest feature film to arrive. Edgar Wright as a director loves to give his movies style and his movies are unique. I avoided many of the trailers. I only saw the first one and the first trailer caught my interest to the movie immediately. I was like "man, this is how you make a trailer". You don't give away anything. It hooks you into the general idea of the movie. It all looked great and I saw potential in the movie. So, does the film reach that potential? 

Yes.

Part II: Plot Synopsis

Baby Driver is about a guy named "Baby" who works for a group of criminals as a getaway driver. He doesn't like what he does, so he wants to move away from his life in crime. He meets a young lady named Debora and falls in love. Baby must plan an escape from his crime life with his new girlfriend.

Part III: Direction & Style

Direction

This movie has brilliant direction. As I expected, Edgar Wright gives tons of style in this movie and I love it. It's energetic. It's fast-paced and I can tell Edgar Wright made sure he can keep the energy flowing within the movie and keep it exciting.

Style

Like I said earlier, the movie's style is energetic and vibrant. Another thing I love about the style of the movie is its use of the score. I'll get into the score itself later in the review analysis, but the its implementation of the score works well within the style of the movie.

Part IV: Visual Presentation

Cinematography & Framing

The cinematography looks good. Framing is really well-done. The way the scenes are framed and how it flows works well with the music. I love the color palette. The movie here looks beautiful and vibrant with lots of energy here. This movie hits it home for me in terms of visual composition.

Camerawork

The camerawork is nice. The camera crew did a nice job keeping the action flowing and maintaining tension in the action sequences, especially the getaway driving sequences. The action is shot well.

Acting

All of the actors were good in this movie. Kevin Spacey was awesome as usual. Ansel Elgort did a fine job portraying his character. Nothing to complain about. Everybody else did a good job adding a bit of flavor to their characters except for maybe 1 or 2 people.

Editing
The editing here is great. I can tell the editors meticulously did as much as they could to perfectly transition scenes and get the energy flowing within the movie. The editing here is on-point. Bravo, editors.

Part V: Sound Design and Musical Composition

Sound Design

Even the whole sound design works well with the score of the movie. The sound design is great in this movie.

Score

I'll be talking a lot about the score in this analysis because the score is a really big feature in this movie. Now that I think about it, you can almost class this as a musical. The film is made with the music. The scenes flow with the music, the editors made sure the scenes transition perfectly to match the songs. Basically, the music here is the star of the movie in terms of its presentation. You can tell Edgar Wright wrote the script for the music because of how the film is constructed with the music as framework and everything else supplementing the score. The score itself is great. Every single track that was played sounded great and they offered a variety of tracks too. I loved that.

Part VI: Screenwriting & Character Composition

Script & Screenwriting

Edgar Wright wrote a good script for this movie. The dialogue works well. There's comical moments here and things that make it a really fun movie. There were some problems I had with the ending of the movie. It wasn't bad or poorly written. It was just that I didn't like some of the choices made towards the third act of the movie when it comes to screenwriting.

Character Composition

Character composition here, in my opinion, was the weakest aspect of this movie. It wasn't bad. It was just okay. The characters are given flavor and personality, but other than that, they're not really as fleshed out as I would have liked them to be.

Pacing

This movie is fast paced but I didn't feel it was too fast-paced. I think the pacing was nearly perfect. I thought there was a slight drag in the pacing between the 2nd and 3rd acts, but other than that, the pacing here is smooth as butter. The first act was pretty much perfect, then I started to notice some of that energy from the first act went away during the middle of the movie.

Part VII: Verdict & Conclusion

Basically, this is a really fun movie that I enjoyed. I think a lot of other people will enjoy it as well. There's action, there's comedy, there's music. On a technical level, this is a great film. However, it has a gimmick, which is the music that I mentioned many times. That's not necessarily a bad thing because nothing in this movie is bad. It's just that aside from the score, editing, and pacing, there's not much else to it in terms of what makes the movie stand out.  But, I don't think that matters much because this is still a beautifully crafted movie that's also entertaining to watch. It did pretty much exactly what I expected ever since I saw its first trailer.

Score: A