Given the amount of awkwardly snappy dialogue found in “Baby Driver” (2017), I shall feel no shame in turning this review into a gearhead punfest for a film whose plot stalls out just before the checkered flag. The backstory (good kid collides head-on with bad dude) is finely tuned and the setup (one last job, girlfriend waiting for a fast getaway) is a high-octane classic, but the leaky climax is all over the road, loose in, tight out and full of knocks, pings and run-on. Not even the music, which flows like pure diesel, can jump-start this poor-handling caper flick.
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Every film I watch that’s set in the 1980s feels like a TV movie. Maybe the ’80s never happened. Maybe I just watched it on TV. Josh Duhamel reeks of TV movie – in a good way – making him perfect for the maddeningly cocky, charismatic namesake of “Bandit” (2022). Based on an actual series of 1980s bank heists in Canada, the plot construction is as simple as the robberies are elaborate, making it small yet fun. Mel Gibson plays a loan shark with rock-hard fists – and even he’s Canada nice. Elisha Cuthbert is a composite character of every 1980s sitcom girlfriend.
Some Guy Ritchie films , like “The Gentlemen,” are big, sloppy fun, while others, like “Wrath of Man,” (2021) are just big and sloppy. In the latter, the soundtrack heralds a menacing tone that persists as one criminal seeks payback from another. There’s lots of standard Ritchie touches – jumping back and forth in time, the audience never quite knowing whose side anyone is on – but some plot points are dwelled upon while others breeze by confusingly. But the tonal bleakness lacks the comic blackness Ritchie is often able to mine from intramural mayhem. Something’s missing in all this carnage. Humanity?
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