Baby Driver

Is 5 stars maybe a little bit of an overreaction and not entirely worthy? Maybe…but also I cannot, off the top of my head, think of really a single thing wrong with this movie and so I think that says something. Also the claims I’m already guessing of this being “style other substance” are completely ridiculous: yes it’s a very fun story with slick editing, music and direction but what really sells it is that it works so excellently as a dramatic narrative, portraying a character who is, at all times: trapped, and showing how, even if it was a decision that put him in jail for 25 years, he finally gets to make his own decisions at the end. That’s just the immediate takeaway stuff, but there’s definitely a lot under the surface that I could get into in a future review. —————————————————————————— Edit - Here’s a rough breakdown of Buddy’s character and purpose:  from how Buddy reacted to Bats saying he was a former stockbroker who abandoned his family after the debt got too high we can only assume he did exactly that, which immediately shows that he’s deeply arrogant and impulsive, which sets up his willingness to immediately try to murder Baby’s innocent gf out of spite, and ultimately the reason why he fails is because he’s so inherently immature and childish that he prioritises making Baby suffer over actually killing him, which ties back to him being unable to handle the debt and so leaving his family because he was too immature to deal with the adult world, and idea that Baby ultimately rejects at the end by choosing to stop acting like a baby and face his problems, instead of running away like Buddy(both of their names even start with the same letter) this being one of main points of the movie further reinforces how this isn’t style over substance, and rather the style reinforces the substance. The fast paced driving scenes are shot that way to parallel Baby’s headspace in those scenes, as while the scene is usually chaotic he’s quite calm and calculated while inside the car and usually it plays quite fast and fun music but when Baby is being confronted by Bats and Buddy suddenly the music in the background is quite tense and the editing is a lot slower.