Baby Driver - Review

I’m a sucker for well implemented music in a film. My favourite scene in all of cinema is probably the deeply unsettling ‘In Dreams’ lip sync in Blue Velvet and other contenders include the ‘Just Dropped In’ fuelled fever dream in the Big Lebowski. Music can make a film and, primarily due to its musicality, I love Baby Driver.

This isn’t to say that I am easily won over by any old soundtrack or song choice – in fact, I’m often quick to complain. For example, I hate it when music is just used to elicit a rote emotional response: the music is jaunty, you must laugh; the strings are being ladled on, you should feel sad. Baby Driver just nails the concept of sound design though, boasting some of the most impressive sound (and visual) editing I’ve ever experienced. Though it’s technically a heist film, it’s really a musical. Yes, the characters don’t burst into song, but the film is built upon a backbone of rhythm.

This all springs from an inspired narrative device: a protagonist (Baby) who suffers from tinnitus and medicates this by constantly listening to music on an iPod. As the viewer, you (almost exclusively) hear what Baby hears. The music overrides all other sound when both earbuds are in; it dims when one is removed and remains as an undercurrent as long as an iPod is playing. There is occasional scoring, but Baby Driver doubles down on this neat conceit and does some really special things with it.

The brilliance is not that music is pretty much always playing; the brilliance is that the film is edited around the music. The songs are (pun very much intended) instrumental to every scene and were even played to the actors during filming so that they could sync actions to the beat. The result of this is jaw dropping. Cars move to the music; guns fire in sync to drum hits; and frenetic visual editing means that any variation in music is met with something appropriate on screen. It’s genuinely entrancing. The film opens with a sublime car chase featuring spectacular stunt driving that is all achieved through practical effects. There’s no green screen trickery to be found: the cars are dancing around the screen and you can almost feel the physical weight of the action. The action itself is also very imaginative, constantly surprising you with clever touches and inspired ways to mirror the music. It also helps that the soundtrack is killer. It’s pretty diverse and the choices are uniformly perfect (though, at one point, Golden Earing’s ‘Radar Love’ kicked in – making me super excited – but it was prematurely silenced. Sacrilege, I say!). My personal highlight was the inclusion of ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus (I saw them in concert once: best concert I’ve ever been to, much to my surprise) which underpins a climactic action sequence. The sheer variety of musical elements in that song is twinned with a staggering variety of visual sequences, making for one spellbinding set piece.

On a technical level, Baby Driver is nothing short of sublime. The proficiency on display is intimidatingly brilliant. For just shy of two hours you are treated to a masterclass in editing and direction. It’s not just the music, Edgar Wright is one of the best visual story tellers out there. The consistent use of fast cuts consistently undermines lesser action films as it can disorientate, sap physicality, or just seem like a crutch to mask prosaic fight choreography (Liam Neeson doesn’t actually need to be good at punching people if you just show a close up of a fist and then cut straight to it hitting a face). In Baby Driver, this editing style just works. The action is already brilliantly choreographed and the fast cuts just help to focus your attention on the right elements. Wright knows just where to place the camera (and for how long) to imply the correct thing. The film bursts with energy and so much of this comes through pure camera work. It almost feels like showing off in places, as narrative threads are stitched together through visual editing alone.

The acting is also really solid. Characters are quite broad, erring on the side of caricature, but this works. It’s a vibrant, energetic film – cartoonish in its brilliance. Again, it’s basically a musical and the larger than life characters match the overall atmosphere to a tee. Ansel Elgort is simply magnetic as the charming protagonist. Outside of this, John Hamm is wonderfully dynamic and Jamie Foxx dials it up to eleven as the aptly named ‘Bats.’ Kevin Spacey seems to be channelling Lester from Grand Theft Auto 5 as heist co-ordinator and, well, I could go on listing actors: everybody is really good, even Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

Basically, Baby Driver is a really awesome movie – so awesome that I headed straight to the ticket booth after exiting the cinema so that I could go see it again, straight away (just as enjoyable the second time). However, it’s not without its problems: the main one being the script. This is Edgar Wright’s first go as sole script writer and… well, it shows. The overall plot is clichéd and predictable but, to give credit where credit is due, it does execute these clichés well. It’s a genre movie and it treads known ground with a spring in its step that you’ve never seen before. The joy becomes seeing how it injects life into tired tropes or uses predictability as a catalyst for innovative action. In places though, it falls a bit flat. The romantic sub plot, though enjoyably earnest, has its issues - due to it being somewhat underdeveloped. Lily James is real charming as Debora but is there just to be fallen in love with (and to fall in love with a heart-of-gold criminal). This lame gender representation is somewhat balanced by Eiza Gonzalez as a kick-ass criminal but even her storyline goes into some, umm… less than progressive areas. It’s not a misogynistic film at all but the gender balance could be a bit better. Female characters are too often plot devices that are used in tired ways to motivate men.

The dialogue is also inconsistent. It’s a very funny film but this is primarily down to visual comedy and oh-so-clever sound editing. There are great lines but there are also some real clunkers. Too often characters say things that characters would only say in films and the magic is somewhat lost. It also has no interest in going further than pure entertainment and, while it doesn’t need to, I feel a sharper script could tread satirical ground or lace in some profundity without sacrificing any of the pure entertainment. At one point, a heist starts with a character spouting how they are really claiming back their own money; the point being made is not satirical but, for a second, I was reminded of last year’s Hell or High Water. You can subtly lace satire into a film while still being really entertaining; I didn’t want it to go all the way into Hell or High Water territory but a taste would have been nice.

However, Baby Driver merely aims for full on entertainment and passes with flying colours. It’s not that it only does one thing well, it’s that the film is running victory laps with its central conceit. It’s easy to gripe about weaknesses in the script but the level of filmmaking on display is just sublime. Ultimately, Baby Driver is just so intricate and masterful that you can’t help falling in love with it.

127 Hours (With Persona 5)

After spending as much time playing Persona as Aron Ralston did in that canyon, I have completed a single play through and feel ready to explain my assorted opinions. Fortunately, and unlike Mr Ralston, I have emerged with both arms. However, now that Persona 5 is (supposedly) out of my life, its absence does feel like a phantom limb.

At this point, before espousing my opinions on the latest instalment, I should establish my Persona credentials. I haven’t touched the first, the second or the second second but am a lover of Personas 3 and 4 (having played both on my Vita). The Vita port of Persona 4 (Golden) is legitimately one of my favourite games due to its eclectic characters and focus on time management. I love a game where I have to forge my own path and make actual decisions: not binary dialogue choices that change the colour of a light in an ending cutscene but day to day decision making that opens up opportunities while closing off others.

I will preface the following with admitting that I love (yes, love) Persona 5. It didn’t have the impact that Persona 4 did – you never forget your first – and I do have far more criticisms of it than I do with any other Persona game, but the strengths are outstanding.

Because Persona 5 is so large (and daunting) you end up saying some pretty bizarre things about it. One of my go to phrases has become: ‘the last 75 hours are incredible.’ This is, truly, an insane thing to say. But it’s true! Some stuff happens and it’s at that point where all the wonderful systems start to interlink and you are in a place where you have so much to do and only limited time to do it in.

Another seemingly bizarre statement: the first 8 hours aren’t very good. In most games, this would be intolerable – and it is an issue here. But when there are still about 120 left, you can almost forgive a period of relative low quality that is the length of your average video game. Actually, when I put it that way, maybe you can’t forgive it. The introduction is poor and that is a problem. The major caveat is that it is only poor ‘by Persona standards’ but this is still disappointing.

The main issue is how constricting the opening is. Persona 5 is clearly made as an entry point to the series for new fans. There’s a perfect storm of reasons to finally play Persona: the PS4 is hugely popular and owners want a hot new exclusive (even if it is on PS3 also); Persona 4 was a sleeper hit that now has huge cult acclaim (which will lead people to check out the new one) and – somewhat linked to the first point – a Persona game is finally running on current hardware (not many wanted to pull their PS2 out for 100+ hours to play Persona 3 or 4 in 2007/2008 when they were busy with 360s and PS3s). The knock on effect of this predicted influx of Persona fans: hella tutorials. My God are there tutorials and my God is it limiting. I just wanted to be let loose to enjoy the aspect of Persona that I love: freedom of choice and time management. For so long it is forced activities and early nights. In fact, that’s an overall complaint with the game: too many early nights. Far too often you are forced to end a day in which you have been given no choice. It has to happen for plot reasons occasionally but it’s a real pain due to the frequency of this. Luckily, the mandatory content in the first 8 hours is really compelling, if a bit slow. There’s an interesting framing device and the first dungeon has a really neat narrative. Unfortunately, early introductions to characters are not wholly positive but, later on, these loveable scamps will win you over.

The framing device, in general, is worth mentioning. It’s cool: you are being interrogated and explaining all that led to your capture. It enables the game to start with a flashy abilitease and gives some overall structure. It’s not used that well though. It’s frequently unclear as to whether your interrogator is hearing everything you are ‘playing’ as they respond in ways that imply they don’t see the whole picture but sometimes in ways that imply they do. Getting a new confidant (the new name for social links) flashes you forward to weird questions about this person in a way that doesn’t always make sense. You meet the person and it is established who they are – a hacker, per se – and then the interrogator asks how you did something – for example, did you have access to a hacker. You as the player raise an eyebrow and think… Wait, are you actually listening to me? We just established that. It’s hokey and even in the central narrative it’s genuinely unclear how much you are getting across to your conversational partner and this ambiguity impacts the success of the narrative. This links to a grander issue of some poor writing - some due to obvious bad translation and some due to straight up shitty writing. There’s a bit towards the end where two villains stand for ten minutes and explain each other, just doling out pointless exposition. Genuinely, one of them just breaks down the career history of this guy to the guy himself, in a way that is only at all relevant because you need to know this information as a player. This conversation would never actually happen and things like that happen too often.

On the positive side, gameplay is so much better than ever before – and I love Persona gameplay. There are some really clever wrinkles added to the battle system and I adore the dungeons. Many have been put off by the central puzzles that each have but, for me, these aspects were overwhelmingly positive. I liked how tailor made these experience were and that I still had classic randomly generated dungeons to go through if I wanted. Confidant bonuses are also really well thought out and bring some mechanics which are genuine game changers. Elements feed into each other better than ever before and it makes everything feel so worthwhile – even when some of the confidant storylines are formulaic to a fault. One niggle: traversal options and a cover system are cool but the controls are not up to it (and neither is the camera).

So, the holistic view of Persona: the first 8 hours are confining and somewhat infuriating; the first 50 hours are very good but left me in a state of like rather than love; the last 75 hours are wonderful! That’s not a bad ratio of quality and it makes the game really rewarding. So, time to justify my adoration of the back two thirds (roughly). Here be spoilers… massive spoilers:

Persona 5 goes places.

 It goes to fascinating places that I didn’t think it would go to and it makes good on some things I never thought it would. The overall thematic statements really struck a chord with me. It’s a game about challenging the status-quo, standing up for what you believe in and about not letting the apathy of society get in the way of progress. It is a game about moral superiority and, for want of another phrase, being a warrior for social justice, and…. Actually, I really like that stuff. It’s punk rock; it’s youthful rebellion; it’s saying that things don’t have to be a certain way. It’s also quite damming to the older generation in a way that I think is justified. It chimes with zeitgeist movements, like the current Labour party or the partial rise of Bernie Sanders. It’s about (LITERALLY) breaking your chains and working for the greater good.

The game starts with imagery of you being chained and locked down, these chains permeate the overall presentation in a way that I thought was purely stylistic. It’s an incredibly stylish game full of visual motifs but this overwhelming sense of style means you read everything as aesthetic rather than symbolic. However, very late in the game – I’m talking final boss late – this imagery comes full circle. It comes after you have attacked something which is basically the opiate of the people; you have fought against bourgeoisie controlling figures and have pushed an ideology of waking up the passive populace in order to overthrow the current system. You’re fighting a god. It’s awesome. That god is a literal god of control that has been used, in other ways, as a controlling force throughout the game. You realise that the entire game has been set up as a ‘game’ in fiction (not a video game but a manufactured scenario in which you are being set up) and you’re into MGS2 style meta-narrative shit. And it’s wonderful. You spend the game breaking people form the control of their base desires whilst also taking down controlling figures in society and BAM, it turns out that a familiar character (who seemed strange at the start, in a way that seemed like a critique but was actually foreshadowing) is not who he says he is. You have been controlled by the God of Control and it’s symbolic of the place of the disaffected youth in society. Your pseudo-young offender background makes for even better commentary on how the youth are demonised by adults who claim they know better but actually enforce negative aspects of society. Then, back to the boss fight, you literally break out of these chain – the same chains that recur as a visual motif. It goes from having Marxist undertones to basically saying: ‘Persona users have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Persona users of all countries unite.’ Characters are even referencing you TAKING THE WORLD. There’s a revolution in the streets; the camera zooms in on a youth giving a revolutionary fist pump. It’s fucking glorious. It actually goes there and it goes there well.

It’s these thematic elements, and the political thrust, that make Persona 5 soar for me. The gameplay is still fantastic but, to be honest, when Persona returns, they need to shake things up. There are already elements that seem limited by the overall structure and another game of that exact structure will just provide diminishing returns. This one last time though, it works and it works really well. I’ve given a lot of my life to Persona 5 and I plan on giving it even more. What a game!