Baby Driver: Love Driven

I might be the wrong person to watch this edit. I fell in love with this movie the day it came out and saw it 4 times in theatres. Being an Edgar Wright film this was a huge undertaking in the first place. Kudos for giving it a shot.

Like the other reviews have said, there are noticeable cuts in both the video and audio. This was expected as baby driver original was finely cut to the beat. Imo you could probably cut all the monsters Inc references and still have a clean cut. The audio doesn't cut very well when Doc starts talking to Baby after the P. O. scouting scene and the only thing you need it for is the Monsters Inc reference. Being a music centric film, it's quite noticeable when the music fades out in order to hide a cut. Most of that was in the effort of making the film less bloody so I won't fault the fan editor for that choice.

Narratively, it is better. Docs change of heart is more believable. The ending is ok, it's too bad there wasn't additional footage of baby and Deborah driving to lengthen the ending as it felt like it was cut a bit short to me. The chosen cuts also gave less depth to Baby and made him more villain-ish than I would have liked. I'm also not a huge fan of flashbacks.

Overall, it was worth the watch. I'm probably only going to watch Baby Driver proper after this as, in my eyes and ears, the beat is more important than narrative for this film. That and I like the extra bloodiness.

I am a fan of Edgar Wright's films, so when I read JasonFlippy's thread about wanting to make some changes to Baby Driver I was quite interested to see what would come of it. Wright's film-making style and use of music, particularly in this film, means that making any significant changes unobtrusively is quite a challenge.

I don't have much of a problem with Spacey's character arc in the original film, but I do appreciate that it does seem a bit of a sudden change of heart. I was curious to see if the desired change could be pulled off, and am quite impressed with how Jason has made this work. The reduction in Doc's screentime required to implement it does background him a little as a character, and reduces the sense of his relationship with Baby as being unusual compared to most of the people he uses in his heists, but not in a way that creates problems for the narrative. The character's throughline and behaviour is definitely more internally consistent in this edit.

I think the related change that removes Baby working off a debt to Doc and working is generally effective - where the original film had Baby trying to pay off his debt to Doc without getting anyone hurt, in this edit it feels like Baby is lying to himself about the reality of being a getaway driver for an armed robbery crew and over the course of the film is forced to acknowledge the reality of what he does.

As others have mentioned the main issue with the implementation of this is a short snippet of music at around 00:40:28 where Baby's calls to Debora at the diner have been stitched together, which also drowns out part of Baby's dialogue. I think that this part needs some more finessing, as there's also a fairly random ~3 second shot of money being tossed into Baby's safe-keeping spot.

One thing that I do think works against this edit are some of the cuts to reduce the bloodiness of the gunshots - partly on a purely practical basis (the chase/shootout after the Post Office Job is so tightly cut to the music that IMO any changes would be noticeable, as they are here) and partly on a narrative basis, because this escalating violence is precisely what Baby has been trying to ignore but is now forced to confront. It feels like an editing choice that's running counter to the story being told in the film, particularly because it comes after we have already seen a fairly bloody shootout with the corrupt cops who were dealing weapons.

I like the way the new ending is cut - as garstazi has mentioned in their review, the original epilogue is weaker than the rest of the film; tightening the focus to just Baby and Debora is a good choice and allows the film to close on a shot of what both have expressed a desire for - hitting the road with no plan but to keep going.

Overall, I think this edit is a small bit of polish away from being an excellent alternate presentation of the film.

I had forgotten how the original ending is bland, boring and predictable as hell; I personally hated it, though it was against the theme and it didn’t make any sense for Baby’s narrative arch. If you’re showing a kind of Bonnie and Clyde lookalike story (they get a few mentions in the film, just to remind the audience), the story either ends just like they did or it allows the duo to run away. In the original, the writers opted for a middle ground between these two, which doesn’t land at all.

The ending here is perfect, the narrative arch becomes fully completed and it just makes sense for the characters. Well done!

Just a few audio issues I’ve found:
- there was a bad audio snippet (lasting 0.1-0.2 sec) at 40m27, looks like a leftover from editing.
- at 1h13m00, the song goes perceptively out of rhythm, because of an added cut.
- at 1h26m59, there’s a noticeable audio volume drop and some static; checked the original film just to be sure and it’s not present there.


Edit 15/12/2023:
- all audio issues are fixed on v2.0, I've udpated my score accordingly

I'm the biggest Edgar Wright fan, so seeing any single one of his movies being edited by someone on here instantly gets me excited, however I'd be lying if I said I wasn't slightly skeptical due to how perfect I think Baby Driver is.

Flippy sticks to pretty much the same narrative as the original film, assides from a few tweaks here and there (most notabley the ending), which is in my opinion the best way to go for this sort of film. It works really well with this new pacing and is a really nice and easy watch to go through. I read on Flippy's initial thread that he wanted to fix Kevin Spacey's sudden change of heart at the end of the movie, and while I wouldn't say the charecter is improved upon here, he is far more consistant with his tone and works great as a comic relief charecter.

If I'm being brutally honest there are a few audio issues here and there which pop up specifically in the 35-45 minute range mark, but nothing too bad as these are super easy fixes with extra sound effects and better placement in the mix. And while I can't think of anything in specific, visually I remember thinking some stuff was kinda jumpy when it came to the visual side of things. This clearly isn't a big deal though as I can't even really remember it (also could be the fact I'm so used to the original).

You should be really proud of yourself Flippy, good work!