Baby Driver's soul shines under its cool veneer

Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver. Image courtesy Sony.

It's tempting to just say Baby Driver is cool and call it a day. It definitely looks very cool, highlighted by some great action sequences and a killer soundtrack to boot. But “cool” often implies a lack of substance underneath the glittery surface, and a lot more resides under the cool action sequences and, again, that soundtrack for Baby Driver. There’s plenty of wit and soul to make it worth seeking out and watch a few times to catch those little bits that are easy to miss. It may look cool, but this movie is a bit dorkier than it initially lets on.

It is the modus operandi writer/director Edgar Wright, an incredible visual director who can never quite hide his inherent nerdiness. Even a movie as action-packed and intense as Hot Fuzz will still take a few moments to acknowledge the director's love for a terrible action movie like Bad Boys II. He does bury it a little deeper with Baby Driver though, kicking off with a thrilling opening sequence featuring a heist and some epic driving pulled off by the eponymous Baby (Ansel Elgort). He's not too far off from the prototypical nameless leads in movies like Drive and The Driver, men who are brilliant behind the wheel but can't perform once the engine cools off until they find the right woman. They’re designed to be cool guys who can only say exactly the right thing.

Baby isn't too far off from those characters either. He's awkward out in society, drowning out the world around him by blasting music from one of his many iPods to drown out what handler Doc (Kevin Spacey) describes as severe tinnitus. And Baby does eventually find that special woman who could shake him out of his doldrums in the waitress Debora (Lily James), who sees the good in the complicated, quiet man. But Baby's also a tremendous dork, choreographing to the music blasting into his ears and lip syncing love songs to his deaf adopted father Joseph (CJ Jones). Wright uses his lead character's dorkiness to contrast to the collection of coked-out crooks around him (Jon Hamm, Eliza González and a deranged Jamie Foxx), but also to separate him from the pack of quiet stoic men who came before. Baby isn't an empty husk and doesn't need to search for his humanity; he has his father to guide him and his music to keep his soul at peace.

Baby's connection with humanity is tenuous at best. Wright uses Baby Driver's soundtrack in so many different ways – from atmosphere to cuts to pure entertainment – it's easy to miss how much Baby needs it to survive in the world around him. The motivation for the music is a bit of a bait and switch, with Doc's exposition masking the actual motivation for Baby's obsession with his iPod. The realization that Baby has always needed his music to hide from the world makes him a tragic figure, providing the sentiment needed to keep the audience on his side even as he dips into the darker side of his nature. He needs that music to remain a step away from the terrible crimes he's abetting and to keep him somewhat grounded.

Baby Driver gets some interesting-to-great performances from Foxx, Hamm, Elgort and especially Spacey, but the female roles are underwritten to a discomfiting degree. It's not a problem Wright has had in the past – Shaun of the Dead, The World's End and Scott Pilgrim all have at least one complex female character – which makes it surprising how little James is given to do besides serve as the object of Baby's affection. Giving Wright a pass for it being a trapping of the genre is a little too easy as well; he subverts enough of the genre in this movie to make it an unacceptable excuse.

Wright also has a higher bar than many directors thanks to more than a decade of sustained excellence. Even his worst film, Scott Pilgrim, is a terrific comic adaptation and the best video game movie. Baby Driver is a little off the beaten path compared with the rest of his work, especially with the reduced emphasis on comedy, but the movie still fits in with what Wright has done before. His films whose exteriors – whether they be comedic or aesthetic – cover the complications that rest right underneath, and the dorky heart of their creator.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 113 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Anyone who is a fan of Edgar Wright and people down for some car movie madness.

Take the whole family?: This gets pretty bloody and violent, so it is best to leave the kids at home.

Theater or Netflix?: Definitely good or at least a matinee screening.

Is this movie funny?: It is, but not in the same way as the rest of Wright's filmography. The movie is a little darker than some of his previous works, less devoted to slapstick and watching Simon Pegg fall over fences. But Wright does maintain a few of his patented hidden sight gags to keep things fun, and there is a great reference to Monsters Inc. that pays off toward the end.

Watch this as well?: Anything from Wright is a slice of fried gold, highlighted by Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and the incomparable Hot Fuzz. There are also a decent number of similarities between this, The Driver and Drive to make for a great triple feature.

Transformers: The Last Knight as dumb as expected

Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Last Knight. Image courtesy Paramount.

To begin with, the title for Transformers: The Last Knight is incorrect. There are several knights to be found in this movie, all of whom interact with other knights throughout the movie. There is nary a final knight to be found in this movie, making the title the warning sign for a wretched movie that sucks the energy right out of its audience.

Watching The Last Knight is a dire experience. It has so little going for it that the asinine madness Sir Anthony Hopkins inserts out of his general lack of interest in the material is the best thing the movie has going for it. Everything else is garbage, detritus spawned by barely earned nostalgia and producers sucking those happy thoughts for all the money they are worth. And that's how movies like this come to be, prepackaged as big budget experiences targeted at people who care little for the value of their entertainment. The old fashioned way of describing them are rubes, making director Michael Bay, producer Steven Spielberg, and everyone else involved in creating this rubbish high-priced grifters.

None of this really matters though. The Last Knight will make hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more than a billion dollars, at the box office in the coming weeks. People will watch this despite protestations from many, many people over its lack of quality. This is the dark side of nihilism that doesn't reveal the optimism of nothingness once the absence of importance is accepted. What's being accepted here is bad cinema with too much regard devoted to viewers who take pride in their anti-intellectualism.

To be fair, movies don't need to be smart to have value; the Furious series is pretty great despite how legitimately dumb those films are. Yet they possess both passion and insanity, a desire to entertain their viewers and provide satisfaction for the money spent. The Last Knight does not entertain. A movie supposedly about giant robots fighting one another somehow cannot provide entertainment, even on the fun side of the puerile level. This movie very much lingers on the dark side of juvenile, with a few bits of casual racism and Marky Mark Wahlberg comparing his female co-star Laura Haddock to a prostitute added in to serve as jokes. That it sexualizes pretty much all of its female characters, including a 14-year-old (played by Isabela Moner), is disturbing but expected for this series. Still, none of it actually provides an iota of entertainment. Nothing keeps viewers interested in the characters on screen or the fact that, sometimes, giant robots fight one another to the death.

It's about right that The Last Knight only shows its giant, morphing robots fight on just a few occasions, holding franchise stalwart Optimus Prime in the background until the final act. Bay and company instead toss in some elements that, if one squints hard enough, begin to resemble a story and allow Wahlberg and Haddock to serve as the centers of attention instead of the giant fighting robots. It would have helped if the screenwriters actually tried to keep their narrative logical and create contradicting plot points, or if the haphazard editing had stuck with a logical timeline. There's also some awful, hacky, and terribly worded expositional dialog to move things forward, because this movie doesn't feel the need to show what's happening or allow the actions to guide story.

The selling point for The Last Knight is the action sequences, or at least they would be if viewers could actually follow along with the poorly framed battles. At this point in the series it's tough to find a way to inject interest in seeing the same giant robots fight one another to the death. Bay and crew have effectively run out of ideas on how to make these sequences look cool, which is an odd thing to say considering this is a franchise about giant robots with guns, explosives and swords going at one another. Bay, for all his faults as a filmmaker, used to create singular, well orchestrated action sequences that at least came close to making what are otherwise bad movies at least a little fun. Five films into the Transformers franchise and the thrill is gone for Bay.

Without any redeeming value aside from the scenery Hopkins consumes, The Last Knight is a slog. It leaves them drained from boredom and confusion over the preposterous state this film exists in, and the two-and-a-half hours of it to sift through. But, again, none of this really matters. A ton of people will watch this movie, more than enough to fund two more movies in the near future. Critics will rip them apart to as Bay, Spielberg and Paramount executives sleep comfortably in the piles of money they've conned out of audiences everywhere.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 149 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks who've been roped in to the last few entries.

Take the whole family?: This isn't particularly great for the younger kids, with the heavy doses of violence and bad editing creating a less than comforting viewing experience.

Theater or Netflix?: Just don't bother with it.

How good is the cast?: Of a higher quality than expected, although none of them seem to care. It remains strange how many good actors sign up for these movies. Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Ken Watanabe, and Tony Hale are the highlights for film five. Add them to alumni like Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Alan Tudyk, and many, many others and there's the making for a really good movie. Even American hero Buzz Aldrin has shown up for one of these movies.

Watch this instead?: Best bet is to find a copy of the animated Transformers movie from the '80s – it has a surprisingly stellar cast, including Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Judd Nelson – or watch the original animated series. That, or just find your old toys and make up a way cooler story.

Cars 3 missing ambition, heart

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo) in Cars 3. Image courtesy Disney.

Every time I write a review of a Pixar movie I hit up YouTube to watch clips from the older movies the company has made. It is a form of procrastination, but the clips do result in some inspiration from the wonders the company has produced over the years, or at the least cause me to sob uncontrollably (the opening to Up always gets me). Unfortunately, it's beginning to serve more of a trip down memory lane for when Pixar made great movies. Aside from the wonderful Inside Out, Pixar hasn't made a movie that qualifies as pretty good in about five years. Based on Cars 3, it's becoming more and more common to see exceptional movies like Inside Out be outliers, not standards.

To state it early on, Cars 3 is not a bad movie. The animation remains top notch, the racing scenes are effectively cool and engaging, and just enough of the jokes land to result in a few chuckles from kids in the audience. That, though, isn't Pixar. The company makes legendary animated movies that hit the soul like a hammer or captivate viewers with their sense of humor and great characters. At least, that's how it was for a rather long time. Then Cars came out and started to muddy Pixar's reputation. A wave of sequels to other movies started to drizzle out, some to fantastic (Toy Story 3), a couple to middling (Finding Dory) and at least one to dreadful (Cars 2) results. What's left now is the blend of the two, a third Cars movie a step below Finding Dory and mediocre enough to ask if Pixar has anything left in the tank.

What ultimately sinks Cars 3 is cynicism. This movie is designed to be a cash grab, offering little underneath the glossy patina to digest, or at least remember. Most movies are created to earn some level of profit – whether it be box office sales or merchandise – yet it remains disheartening how much of the focus for this movie is on the toys it'll sell in lieu of telling a solid, satisfactory story. It's particularly weird for this movie considering how much Lightning McQueen (voiced again by Owen Wilson) complains about becoming an empty mascot with little redeeming value beyond a brand name, protesting against the fate of his character in real life to no effect. The continued existence of the Larry the Cable Guy voiced Mater is proof enough that profit outshines creative ambition.

The push away from being a corporate shill is one of many, many messages a person could take out of Cars 3. That the writers undercut that a bit by also praising certain products featuring Lightning McQueen fits the loose moral center that guides this movie. The whole movie has this loose vibe, with plots that don’t go far enough to justify audience engagement or interest. It doesn't really matter that Lightning is intimidated by the fast new racer (Armie Hammer), or annoyed by the young trainer (Cristela Alonzo) who failed at her one shot at being a racer, or seeks life advice from the wise old truck (Chris Cooper) that taught his mentor, or discomfited by the materialistic company owner (Nathan Fillion). None of these plots are fleshed out enough to be interesting in and of themselves, and throwing them all together succeeds only at pushing the run time beyond any level of justification. The only theme that is tracked from beginning to end is McQueen's fear of getting old, which spurs him to try new training methods before giving up and reverting back to what he did before to spite the Moneyball-esque analysis that has apparently taken the love out of the sport.

What it adds up to is Trouble with the Curve mixed with Rocky IV mixed again with whatever racing movie or even feel good sports movie filled with clichés easily anticipated twists you've ever seen. Cars 3 is remarkable for its narrative laziness, and it's just boring watching Cars 3 because the expectations are planted early on and the big twists foretold with little subtlety. Even the themes are outlined blatantly by some awkwardly obvious song choices and bits of clunky expositional dialog. And, honestly, what's the point of watching a movie like this if it doesn't offer anything that hasn't already been done before? It'll keep the kids moderately entertained for nearly two hours, but that's the expectation for movies from lesser studios like Illumination, not one as great as Pixar.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: G

Run time: 109 minutes

Genre: Animated

Ask Away

Target audience: Kids for sure, and along with parents trying to keep their kids occupied for nearly two hours.

Take the whole family?: Nothing too scary or intimidating about this one. Aside from a far too long run time, this is fine for all ages.

Theater or Netflix?: Matinee if you must.

How's the short film?: Really quite charming, if a little strange. Called Lou, the short about a sentient collect of lost and found items that sort of torments a child to be decent is sweet in its own way and often pretty funny. At the least it is far more interesting than the featured attraction.

Watch this as well?: Pick just about any Pixar movie unrelated to the Cars franchise and you'll get some entertainment out of it (along with lots upon lots of tears). For adults, this movie has a lot of parallels to the very strange but fun Will Ferrell racing flick Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Mummy reboot offers few redeeming qualities

Sofia Boutella as the eponymous Mummy in The Mummy. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Any sense of remarkable for the Tom Cruise starring iteration of The Mummy comes from how bad the movie is. Although it isn’t quite interesting enough to qualify as a trainwreck, it is a great example of how bad the screenwriting by committee method can get. There are six people who have their names attached to this thing, and it’s difficult to find areas where more than two of them agreed on a plot point or piece of dialog. The lack of cohesion is stunning and somewhat impressive in how it results in an otherwise unimpressive movie.

The messiness The Mummy exhibits starts with a random text opening quote followed by uninspired voiceover courtesy of a bored Russell Crowe. Then the movie starts in England circa 1127 A.D., then bounces back to present day England, then flashes back yet again to ancient Egypt before stopping for a while in the Middle East in modern times again. The writers in effect created four separate openings to this film, three of would be OK on their own but none of which work in unison with the others. What remains is a good indicator the movie lacks a single direction, a tone it wants to follow and an identity worthy of its predecessors.

What, then, is The Mummy supposed to be? Previous adaptations have worked as a horror film, using the supernatural aspects of the ancient evil to invoke terror. But no one involved in this version seems interested in having this movie be truly scary, and the trace elements of horror that sneak into this movie are subpar. The Mummy character has background comedies tracing back to the days of Abbott and Costello, and this movie does work best using the comedic elements. The writers mine solid material from the moderate silliness of the monster, with one scene involving Cruise, the monster (Sofia Boutella), a few henchman and an awkward entrance by Cruise's love interest (Annabelle Wallis) working as an entertaining example of awkward comedy. Appropriately enough the filmmakers abandon the intentional humor in the middle of the second act, leaving the one enjoyable part of this movie behind.

So what's left is an action-adventure movie, not too far off from the 1999 version, albeit with a slightly darker tone. Except the 2017 Mummy isn't particularly good as an action-adventure flick. The surprisingly sparse action sequences have little vigor and excitement to keep the viewer interested in the fates of Cruise and the far too young for him love interest Wallis. The adventure is limited to England and the early sojourn to the Middle East, making it a less than enthralling globe trotting journey. It's difficult to spend more than $125 million on a movie and come out with something this blasé.

The Mummy becomes remarkably stupid toward the end of the second act with the proper introduction of Crowe's character, the mysterious leader of a secret organization, Dr. Henry Jekyll. That's Henry Jekyll of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame. The reveal is as dumb as it sounds, and the scenario only gets worse when Crowe hams it up when he inevitably transforms into Mr. Hyde. It feels like one of the writers or a few people from Universal decided threw that in there to kick off the Universal monster movie universe, and it comes across as awkwardly as it sounds. It also makes little sense to have a man as volatile as Henry Jekyll be in charge of any secret organization, but that's one of the lesser problems this movie faces.

If there's any single potentially interesting aspect to The Mummy, it's an ending that isn't as saccharine and easy as it could've been. A real sense of tragedy sneaks in for the final few moments that makes sense despite all of the messiness beforehand. But, again, this movie is dumb. It's not smart enough to end at the right time, favoring an ending with even more asinine voiceover and a similarly useless closing scene with Cruise and resurrected co-star Jake Johnson. The Mummy is the type of movie that not only isn't able to do anything right, but doubles down on doing the exact wrong thing.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 110 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Tom Cruise followers and viewers who want to see the start of a monster universe.

Take the whole family?: This'll probably be a little intimidating for kids younger than 8.

Theater or Netflix?: Once again, stay at home and let it come to you.

Is the film sexist?: It is with its treatment of Sofia Boutella's character. Having the monster as a woman is fine and kind of cool, but the filmmakers portray her as a Jezebel creating mayhem for the men around her. That the filmmakers literally bind her at one point is troublesome for a whole host of reasons as well.

Watch this instead?: The 1999 Mummy with Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz isn't great, but the action is solid and the characters are fun enough. It also has one of the cooler haboobs ever depicted in a movie.

Wonder Woman a flawed but solid superhero outing

Gal Gadot as the eponymous hero in Wonder Woman. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Wonder Woman is by far the best DC film since Christopher Nolan wrapped up his Batman trilogy in 2012. Wonder Woman has a light touch with its take on the eponymous character and a willingness to have its main character thrive when throwing her fists through Germans and gods alike. But this is still a DC film, meaning it has the Zack Snyder-related DC problems that go along with some remarkable similarities to another superhero movie from a rival company.

At least Wonder Woman offers a livelier take on its source material than the rest of the super serious DC franchise. There are honest to goodness jokes in Wonder Woman, moments of designed levity with wordplay and even hints of fun goofiness every now and then. Director Patty Jenkins even allows for a little sunlight to shine on screen, using the brightness of Wonder Woman's (played by Gal Gadot) home island of Themyscira to contrast against the dour grey of the European landscape she eventually stumbles into. It's not quite as bright or funny as the average Marvel film, but it remains a refreshing change of pace and potentially a sign of lovelier days for DC films.

If only the narrative was as refreshing as the aesthetics. Told through a moment of reflection by Wonder Woman, aka Diana Prince, the movie tells a pretty straightforward origin story, starting with a stereotypical struggle between the character's mother (Connie Nielsen) and aunt (Robin Wright) over her future. There is the obvious love interest (to be fair, it is the effortlessly charming Chris Pine), a couple of stock Teutonic masterminds (Danny Huston and Elena Anaya), a helpful British gent (David Thewlis) and some fun and silly sidekicks (played by Lucy Davis, Saïd Taghmaoui, Eugene Brave Rock and Ewen Bremner) around to keep things lively. There's also an armada of German villains to dispatch with; setting the movie during World War I allows for some convenient stock bad guys to dispense with. Remove the family and switch the gender and this is effectively Captain America: The First Avenger. Except it isn’t as good as Captain America: The First Avenger. Wonder Woman lacks either the devotion to the era or the moderate deconstruction of it First Avenger director Joe Johnston orchestrated with his movie. It's not necessarily a problem that Marvel did this story first; the issue is really that Marvel did it much better.

Wonder Woman does at least use its retread plot to address a few interesting themes, most notably focusing on the nature of humanity and how one maintains hope in the worst times. There's enough run time for Wonder Woman to go from naive to disillusioned to finding that balance between seeing the devils and angels that populate the human soul. The conversion from step two to step three is a little rushed – it takes place over the course of about 10 minutes during the third act – but it at least offers Wonder Woman a complete character arc to supplement some of her actions in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Everything comes together though in a less than fulfilling manner. The ideas Wonder Woman floats never come to a natural fruition, either being rushed by the screenwriters or abandoned as the movie progresses. The sequences occur in a staccato fashion with loose narrative threading but not enough to keep the movie tied together. Despite having nearly 150 minutes to tell an origin story, Wonder Woman still feel incomplete, eliding over key elements or just missing scenes that would tie up loose ends.

In other words, this is a DC film, and DC films can’t be complete works of their own but require sifting through the content edited out of the movie to provide the full picture.

It’s not the only flaw Wonder Woman shares with the rest of the DC series. The use of CGI is abundant in this movie, but the quality of it is at best mediocre and most frequently terrible. For some reason DC just cannot get the CGI right for fight scenes, resulting in a cartoon Wonder Woman fighting a god. Jenkins throws in her fair share of token slow motion shots that look cool at first but lose their appeal as the frequency increases (a fate suffered by Snyder movies). There’s also a rather lazy bit of writing toward the end of the movie that effectively undercuts Wonder Woman’s character growth, making it dependent less on the character’s internal growth and more on a trite relationship. Perhaps someday DC will learn from its mistakes, but for now it at least has one movie that comes close to being pretty good.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 141 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Audiences who have been waiting for a very long time for a comic book movie featuring a female protagonist, plus any Wonder Woman fanatics.

Take the whole family?: This is pretty violent, but the amount of blood is minimal and the innuendo is greater than what is on screen.

Theater or Netflix?: If you're going to see it in theaters, might as well go for the matinee and save a few bucks.

Do the Germans speak German?: In this movie they speak English in a German accent. It’s one of those weird movie quirks that always bugs me. It makes zero narrative sense for a German to speak English among other Germans. And it’s not like the accented English is replacing the Teutonic speech; the Germans still speak to the other characters in English using the same accent.

Watch this as well?: As mentioned above, Captain America: The First Avenger shares a lot with Wonder Woman. Catching up on a few episodes of the great Justice League animated series is always a good idea as well.