Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017)

Jon Hamm, Eiza González, Ansel Elgort, and Jamie Foxx in Baby Driver

Baby: Ansel Elgort
Debora: Lily James
Doc: Kevin Spacey
Buddy: Jon Hamm
Bats: Jamie Foxx
Darling: Eiza González
Griff: Jon Bernthal
Joseph: CJ Jones
Eddie: Flea
JD: Lanny Joon

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss
Music: Steven Price

As the old moralizing adage has it, anything worth doing is worth doing well. But what if something is not worth doing? Do we really need another car-chase-crammed, Tarantino-tinged, hyperviolent heist thriller? Even if it's as well done as Edgar Wright's Baby Driver? Is "It held my interest" enough? If so, Baby Driver held my interest because Wright created some intriguing characters and assigned them to first-rate actors like Ansel Elgort, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, and Kevin Spacey.* I could wish that they had been given more interesting things to do than commit crimes and try to kill one another off, or that we didn't have to sit through another insane demolition of bright shiny cars to find out who survives and how and why. I could wish for some backstory for Baby (né Miles) beyond the fact that he lost his bickering parents in a car crash and somehow wound up as driver for Doc and caregiver for a deaf-mute black man named Joseph. I could wish that the romance of Baby and Debora didn't seem so formulaic -- you've got a handsome young leading man so he must have a pretty girlfriend, one who puts them in jeopardy. Or I could just sit back and enjoy the thing, especially the wittily chosen music track and the way Wright fits the action to the tunes: The film has a credited choreographer, Ryan Heffington, and since there are no traditional dance numbers it seems that he was hired to help the actors move to the music -- in fact, the whole film was inspired by Wright's work on music videos.

*This may be Spacey's last major movie, given the many charges levied against him. Even Baby Driver is a little hard to watch without those coming to mind.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Scott Pilgrim: Michael Cera
Ramona Flowers: Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Knives Chau: Ellen Wong
Kim Pine: Alison Pill
Stephen Stills: Mark Webber
Young Neil: Johnny Simmons
Wallace Wells: Kieran Culkin
Stacey Pilgrim: Anna Kendrick
Julie Powers: Aubrey Plaza
Matthew Patel: Satya Bhabha
Lucas Lee: Chris Evans
Envy Adams: Brie Larson
Roxy Richter: Mae Whitman
Todd Ingram: Brandon Routh
Gideon Graves: Jason Schwartzman

Director: Edgar Wright
Screenplay: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright
Cinematography: Bill Pope
Production design: Marcus Rowland
Film editing: Jonathan Amos, Paul Macliss

Edgar Wright's hyperactive but witty Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was a box-office failure, despite being an entertaining farrago of everything in 21st century pop culture: comic books, video games, anime, rock, superhero movies, and so on. Critics generally praised it, but that may have been something of a kiss of death, making it too mainstream for the hip. It has since, as such commercial misfires tend to do, become something of a cult movie, finding its audience as it ages and turns into a nostalgia piece. It gets much of its strength from Michael Cera's performance as the sweet slacker Scott, who plays bass in a garage band and has to balance an inappropriate infatuation with the underage Knives Chau and a more appropriate attraction to the très hip Ramona Flowers. Unfortunately, Ramona has a slate of evil ex-boyfriends, each of whom Scott is obliged to vanquish. Chris Evans and Brandon Routh send up their own superhero roles as two of the evil exes, the former a skateboarding movie star with an entourage of stunt doubles, the latter a bassist for a rival band who gets his superpowers from veganism -- about which he is willing to go on at hilarious length. Presiding over the evil exes is record producer Gideon Graves, sneeringly played by Jason Schwartzman. It's all very silly, but it's also bright and colorful fun if you want a break from reality.

Ant-Man (Peyton Reed, 2015)

Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd in Ant-Man

Scott Lang/Ant-Man: Paul Rudd
Dr. Hank Pym: Michael Douglas
Hope van Dyne: Evangeline Lilly
Darren Cross/Yellowjacket: Corey Stoll
Paxton: Bobby Canavale
Sam Wilson/Falcon: Anthony Mackie

Director: Peyton Reed
Screenplay: Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd
Based on the comics by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby
Cinematography: Russell Carpenter
Production design: Shepherd Frankel
Film editing: Dan Lebenthal, Colby Parker Jr.
Music: Christophe Beck

The main reason to see Ant-Man is Paul Rudd, once again proving that casting is the chief thing Marvel has going for it in its efforts to capture the comic-book movie world. Like Robert Downey Jr. in the various Iron Man and Avengers movies, or Chris Pratt in his leap to superstardom in Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014), Rudd has precisely the right tongue-in-cheekiness to bring off a preposterous role, one that the end credits assure us he will be playing again. Rudd, whose quick wit is known from his talk show appearances, also had a hand in the screenplay, which was begun by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish and revised and finished by Rudd and Adam McKay. For once, a comic book film is better before the CGI flash-and-dazzle take over -- the concluding portion of the film is a bit of a muddle, considering that most of the performers in the action sequences are ants. Indeed, the most impressive special effects in the movie are not the action sequences but the "youthening" of Michael Douglas, who is first seen as the much younger Hank Pym in 1989, looking much as he did in The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989), one of the films used by the special effects artists as reference. On the other hand, it has to be said here that Rudd doesn't look much older than he did 21 years ago in Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995).