At once the most overworked and underrated of Wright’s “Cornetto” trilogy, The World’s End is also its director’s most conceptually complex movie, acknowledging the lure and danger of wanting to not grow old—arrested adolescence as paradise and apocalypse in one. It’s also a great showcase for Pegg, a wonderfully elastic comic actor who never quite stretches his characters thin. His remarkably crisp and proficient performance in that film (and Shaun and Hot Fuzz) owe in part to the fact that he has a co-writing credit on each title: one reason that he inhabits these roles so fully is that he helped to create them. While it might be too simplistic to say that Wright generates the technical pyrotechnics and Pegg supplies the soul, the flaws of Baby Driver hint that this equation roughly adds up. Not only is Wright’s American studio debut weakened by the work of its star, Ansel Elgort—a performer so gormless that by comparison he makes Michael Cera look like Robert Ryan—but its greatest liability is its screenplay: the filmmaker’s first-ever fully solo effort in this area. Baby Driver is so poorly written on levels of plot, characterization and (especially) dialogue that Wright’s typically first-rate craftsmanship fails to save it—and, in context, even becomes its own source of annoyance. This gifted director’s relationship to his own style, which is usually so multifaceted and fascinating in its way, has become blithely untroubled, and similar to the same malignant narcissism that mars the work of his pal and sometime collaborator Quentin Tarantino. The difference is that where QT now eagerly imposes his obsessions and fetishes on material that exists well beyond his previously circumscribed, postmodern frame of reference—an exploitation that produces sometimes revelatory discontinuities of intent and effect—Wright seems content to stay cozily inside his wheelhouse, risking next to nothing and achieving roughly the same.
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That the only person to really coax [Baby] out of his shell is pretty diner waitress Deborah (Lily James) is in keeping with the story’s adolescent fairy-tale arc, but it also means that Wright is swapping out one wish-fulfillment scenario for another. Baby’s dawning realization that he’s not only being exploited but also actively participating in terrible, violent crimes cues us for an ambivalence that never quite arrives. Instead, the film buys fully into the teenage-male fantasy of an outcast inspired and finally redeemed by the unconditional love of a cute, steadfast girl whose defining trait is her interest and patience in his traumatic backstory.