'Baby Driver' takes viewers on stylish, engine-revving ride

There's nothing like an epic getaway chase to kick a movie into high gear, and the first five minutes of "Baby Driver " are pure movie magic.

A driver named Baby (Ansel Elgort) sits coolly in a car - black Ray-Ban style shades on his face, earbud headphones in place. His tough-looking passengers (Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Bernthal) exit with comical menace, assault weapons in hand. Baby sits back, cranks up "Bellbottoms" by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and air guitars his way through the sequence while the others rob a bank and exit in a hurry. That's when things really get going as Baby steps on the gas and maneuvers away from the cops with heart-pounding, exhilarating polish. It's a car chase for the ages.

It should be no surprise then that what comes after doesn't quite live up to that initial jolt of adrenaline. Nor should it. Director and writer Edgar Wright crafts a stylish and original action epic with "Baby Driver," which is both as good as anything you're bound to see in theaters this summer and a bit of a drop-off from the incredibly high bar that Wright has proven himself capable of hitting.

It's about an outlaw kid with a good heart who's at a crossroads. Some youthful indiscretions in Atlanta put Baby in debt to a big-time criminal orchestrator, Doc, played by a perfectly over-the-top Kevin Spacey. Baby's been driving Doc's baddies ever since.

We meet Baby two jobs away from being in the clear. To outsiders, he's an odd duck. He doesn't say much, and he always has a pair of headphones in his ears. But this isn't just any aloof millennial. The headphones and omnipresent soundtrack are there for a reason: Baby's got tinnitus and the music helps drown out the "hum in the drum" as Doc explains.

The only people he engages with are his guardian, Joseph (CJ Jones), who is wheelchair-bound and deaf and whom Baby takes care of, and the waitress of Baby's dreams, Debora (Lily James), whom he meets when she breezes into the throwback diner singing Carla Thomas' "B-A-B-Y" to herself. They talk and flirt and fall for each other and wax poetic about heading west in a car they can't afford. It's then that you know things have to start going downhill.

With freedom in sight, Baby's cool is cracking, and things really go sideways when he gets paired up with Bats (a manic Jamie Foxx), who is as crazy as his name suggests, on a few runs.

Elgort is charming as Baby - which is a tough part to get right. But James, a terrific actress, is reduced to a cartoonish approximation of "the girl" who's only there to give our hero something to care about. Or perhaps that's the bigger point of "Baby Driver." In this underground world, no one is "real" - they're all slick coats of paint and simulated cool. But what more do you want from an action pic?