Baby Driver, the new film from Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright, premiered at South by Southwest on Saturday, and the reviews so far are great! (Or scathing, depending on whether or not the phrase “Gone in 60 Seconds for the La La Land crowd,” is intended as a compliment.) Those of us not helping keep Austin, Texas, weird and unmanageably crowded this weekend will have to get our Edgar Wright fix from the trailer. Unfortunately, while it appears Wright has made a fun movie with plenty of car chases, he doesn’t seem to have fully thought through the implicit promise he made to audiences when he decided to title his film Baby Driver.
Let’s face it, there’s really only one thing you want when you buy a ticket to a movie called Baby Driver, and it’s not Simon and Garfunkel. Wright had better be holding back hours of footage of an adorable baby (or babies!) performing amazing stunts behind the wheel of a car (or cars!) or he’s going to have a lot of angry moviegoers. All the trailer gives us is Ansel Elgort playing Ryan Gosling playing “Driver” in Drive, Lily James playing Mädchen Amick playing “Shelly Johnson” in Twin Peaks, Kevin Spacey playing “Kevin Spacey” in Kevin Spacey, and both Jamie Foxx and John Hamm playing the fool. In other words, in terms of character and plot, this looks like a bunch of other movies crashed into each other at high speed and no one could find the Jaws of Life. On the other hand, that’s also true of Wright’s other films Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End, and they’re great. Plus, whoever is driving, the chase scenes in the trailer look insane without being Fast and the Furious–ly cartoonish. So Wright gets the benefit of the doubt until the film’s Aug. 11 release. In the meantime, we’ll always have this Hyundai ad:
