In the twittered view of the great Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver “is a fable, complete with its very own Disney prince and princess, but is also rock n’ roll. Meaning [that] the magic exists in a dirty, genre-tainted world. The film is incredibly precise, [and] flawlessly executed [down] to its smallest detail: breathtaking Russian arm shots, real-world car mount and foot chases executed with the vigor and bravado of a Gene Kelly musical. This is An American In Paris on wheels and crack smoke.”
Everything GDT says is perceptive, excitingly phrased and, by my perceptions, accurate as far as it goes, but like the South by Southwest critics who couldn’t stop wetting themselves when they saw Baby Driver last March, Guillermo sidesteps the final truth of the matter, which is that Baby Driver, after sticking to a buoyant musical-fairytale scheme that feels right for 90 minutes or so, assassinates itself with an injection of foam-at-the-mouth, logic-free, crash-bam-boom insanity over the last 15 or so minutes.
I explained it all last Friday. It’s certainly worth catching for the portion that works (roughly the first five-sixths), but be prepared for that horrible moment when the wheels come off and Baby Driver spews all over itself.