The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Fashioning a smooth collaboration of sight and sound, director Edgar Wright brings forth one of his most daring projects yet with Baby Driver; a music-driven dance of car chases and whizzing bullets which, despite its relatively imaginative setup, seems a little too ‘cool’ for its own good.

Meet Baby (The Fault in our Stars’ Ansel Elgort); an aloof and talented getaway driver working for infamous Atlanta kingpin, Doc (Spacey), who spends his days driving robbers, such as Buddy (Hamm), Darling (Gonzales), Griff (Bernthal) and Bats (Foxx), to their heist targets before taking them back to safety once the job has been done. He suffers from a condition called tinnitus – an injury endured during a car accident which killed his mother when he was a young boy – and he constantly listens to music in order to drown out the ringing in his ears. He is also secretly yearning for a crime-free life and is hoping to get out of it very soon in order to pursue a more-stable future.

Along the way, he meets Deborah (Downton Abbey’s Lily James); a friendly diner waitress who is quick to take a liking to the mysterious driver. The pair soon falls in love and begins sharing their dreams of driving out far out West. But before any of that can happen, Baby – who has always served something of a lucky charm for Doc – soon gets pulled in for another job involving a post-office hit.

Heavily influenced by 90’s bank-robbery-action heavy-hitters such as Point Break and Heat, Baby Driver – an aspiring action musical opera of sorts – gives us plenty of reasons to relish in its wild silliness. Watching Baby whizzing through the streets of Atlanta, whilst trying to stay in sync with whatever song he is listening to at the time is truly something and this musical dance serves to be an essential part of the experience. However, although it is easy to appreciate the efforts involved, both behind and in front of the camera, there is a sense of excessiveness behind every turn, with Edgar not really capable of stepping on the breaks and offering an equal amount of focus on the actual story being told.

Failing to give his characters some much-needed depth, the performances are pretty flat for the most part; Spacey settles on channeling Francis Underwood – see House of Cards – while both Foxx and Hamm seem to be in a different movie altogether.

To be fair, though lacking a bit of versatility, Elgart is charming enough to earn a passing grad, though his romantic entanglement with James could have done with a bit more conviction. As could the movie; hiding the emptiness and the hollowness of the story underneath a flashy hood of hits and misses, Baby Driver shines when moving at top speed. It’s when it slows down that it suffers most.