Baby Driver

Edgar Wright’s hypnotic, brain-throbbingly dreadful, pretentious rehash of Walter Hill’s The Driver for simpletons is soullessly presented as youngster fetishism in two tedious hours of fume-gulping set to “oldies.” Michael Mann merged motion to music thirty seven years ago on Miami Vice but that was to showcase “new” artists. Here, “Baby” (not his real name but he claims it’s his real name for two-thirds of the movie so that every, single solitary song used can be relatable to this movie!), played by Ansel Elgort (yeah I’d call myself Baby with a name like that!), is a heist driver with tinnitus who drowns out the hum with his iPod as he wheels through the nearly barren streets of Atlanta (which are usually clogged with traffic!!) listening to a limited roster of rock hits! Nowhere is this more obvious than when his waitress girlfriend named Debora (Lily James) struggles to think of “any” songs that mention her name. Ignoring songs by Beck, Vangelis, The Queers, Dave Edmunds or the numerous “Debbie” songs that surely apply, she settles for the 1968 T. Rex song as the only example compared to songs containing “Baby” (“Baby, You’re a Rich Man” and “Baby Love” are missing!) Light years of near-empty plot holes permeate a story that was better realized a few months earlier this year in a movie titled Collide, as characters exist and disappear with no rhyme or reason. Trying to protect the girlfriend and his age-stricken foster father, his insurmountable debt to a demanding though fair-minded crime boss named Doc (Kevin Spacey) means Baby must deal with shady thugs on a homicide spree, and it’s this fleshing out of the lone wolf of few words that jeopardizes the momentum of the film by causing its getaway expert to take wet-behind-the-ears risks.

[R]