Baby Driver

The action is, in short, thin yet heavy, burdened with a pointless complexity that serves, above all, to mask—with music and quick cuts—the insignificance, impersonality, and indistinctness of each of its elements.

In Tarantino’s films, the characters have something to say about the pop culture that obsesses them; for that matter, in life, people have something to say about the pop culture that obsesses them. In “Baby Driver,” no one has anything to say about anything. The prevailing gentility of “Baby Driver” depends on its absence of substance. It has an admirably diverse cast, but its characters remain undefined, identity-free, generic. (It’s exactly the sort of ahistorical blanking-out of personal traits and cultural experience that Jordan Peele so successfully satirizes in “Get Out.”) The dialogue is almost entirely functional, advancing the plot without illuminating any ideas or subjects beside the characters’ missions and goals, and that dialogue is festooned with cheap verbal gaud that passes for wit and lands with sub-Catskills thuds, as when one member of the gang, called Darling (Eiza González), is challenged by another, Bats (Jamie Foxx), about her name—he asserts that it’s only her nickname, or “moniker,” and insists that she tell him her real name—which is Monica; or when one plotter, buying masks, mistakes Mike Myers of “Austin Powers” for Michael Myers of “Halloween.”