Excluding his no budget Spaghetti Western homage A Fistful of Fingers, Edgar Wright has only directed five major feature films, but you could make the argument that he’s still yet to put a foot wrong, which is even more impressive when every single one of them has tackled a drastically different genre.
From Shaun of the Dead‘s love letter to the zombie movie to The World’s End‘s apocalyptic sci-fi, via Hot Fuzz‘s simultaneous embrace and subversion of the buddy cop formula and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s video game-inspired comic book adaptation, the filmmaker has always found a way to make the familiar seem fresh.
It helps that they’ve all received rave reviews, too, with his last five efforts scoring between 82% and 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, one thing that always eluded him was a genuine box office smash hit, but that all changed when Baby Driver raced to over $226 million on a budget of less than $40 million, landing three Academy Award nominations in the process.
A heist thriller powered entirely by the soundtrack, it was a bold decision to frame a whole movie around music, but Wright certainly pulls it off with no shortage of style and panache. The camerawork, musical interludes and editing are always perfectly in sync, while the snappy dialogue is delivered by a roster of accomplished talents including Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Bernthal and even Kevin Spacey back when he was still relevant and not a Hollywood exile.
Baby Driver is currently proving to be massively popular on Netflix, too, where it ranks as the ninth most-watched title on the platform on the global chart today, showing us that great action never goes out of fashion.
