Ansel Elgort's Baby isn't your typical wheelman. He isn't an intense spectral presence waiting to be prodded, he's gangly and animated, an observer, locked into his own headspace by a cocktail of tinnitus, crate-diver playlists and some truly terrifying associates. The titular Baby Driver copes with this stimulation overload by obsessively recording and cataloging his interactions, then retreating to his apartment to transform them into chopped up musical loops.
Baby doesn't allow information to stream in at him, he blocks out as much as he can, pruning and refining whatever penetrates until he has his own product at the end of it - be that the terse half-sentences he uses to communicate or the hundreds of C-90 audio cassettes he consigns to an unwieldy briefcase. It's a small detail in the overall film but Baby's analog audio suite, rescued from flea markets by Edgar Wright's pal Kid Koala, reads like a physical manifestation of the writer-director's magpie process.
Baby Driver is built out of Wright's earworms, the shots and movements that have lodged in his brain and refused to budge. Wright's film chews up and recontextualises the bits and pieces of film history that the director has clung to, be that the freewheeling buzz of The Blues Brothers or the unkillable enemy of The Terminator. Given Wright's big screen fluency, Baby Driver has a lot of material for editors Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos to cleave through. The duo assemble the film on pronounced, insistent beats, using music and diegetic sound to layer and dictate pace even outside the action. This energetic, often chaotic, approach to film form peaks with a warehouse shoot-out that uses automatic gunfire to transform a geographical mundane sequence into a ferocious series of jolts.
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