“Baby Driver” begins with a bang, a showstopper of an opening number reminiscent of the ecstatic traffic jam in “La La Land,” only this time with the cars themselves as the dancers. Baby (Ansel Elgort) and Debora (LILY JAMES) jack a car to get away from a criminal gang. As charming as “Baby Driver” strives to be, the appeal starts to curdle once Wright makes his fetishistic aims clear. “Baby Driver” culminates in pulverizing havoc, its overworked, hyper-stimulated ethos barely offset by a too-tidy final reckoning. Appropriately enough, “Baby Driver” ends by promiscuously borrowing from yet another genre: the time-honored cake-and-eat-it movie whose vicious, vicarious pleasures are both exploited and exonerated.

Source: Washington Post June 27, 2017 14:59 UTC