Keen to watch a movie this weekend? Then Baby Driver is a pretty good option.
The baby-faced hero of Baby Driver is a young man (Ansel Elgort) with consummate driving skills and a tortured past. Because of one youthful mistake Baby (that’s his name) has to work off a debt for crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) as a getaway driver on bank heists. Baby meets and falls in love with waitress, Debora (Lily James), and thereafter becomes keenly conflicted about where his loyalties and values lie.
Ansel Elgort, the titular character in Baby Driver. Picture source: Den of Geek
On the face of it this plotline looks like a fairly typical crime drama but the film offers some surprising combinations. Doc is quite funny and the criminal teams he hires are oafs. Baby lives with his deaf, wheelchair-bound stepfather, of whom he takes tender care. Music features strongly; our hero suffers from a constant ringing in his ears and has to listen to music all the time. Many scenes show Baby, a man of few words, seemingly zoned in only to his own inner world, only to reveal that he has observed and memorised everything around him in the minutest detail. And then of course there’s Baby’s past which slowly becomes clear, engendering viewer sympathy in the process.
The driving scenes are really, really good to watch.
Baby Driver opens at cinemas in South Africa on 4 August 2017.
a feast of tales 