I call ’em Record Collection Movies. You know what I mean. They’re those films where the director lays about 297 old rock songs on us for a big, epic feeling. It was either Martin Scorsese or George Lucas who got this started and now almost every auteur director is obligated to make at least one. Paul Thomas Anderson has done it. Also, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies are partly defined by it. If you were in a 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s rock band and one of your songs hasn’t yet been used in an action sequence, a character crescendo, a violent death, a sweeping montage or a party scene in an acclaimed movie, just be patient. One of those directors will get in touch with you eventually.
This new entry into the genre from Edgar Wright is pretty good. His excuse for bombarding us with Queen, Barry White, The Commodores, Golden Earring, Blur, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Martha and the Vandellas, T. Rex, The Damned and a whole lot more? His lead character has tinnitus from a childhood accident and now he achieves a heightened intensity from constant music shouting through his ear buds. Somehow he’s channeled this into a genius for driving the getaway car for crooks after robberies. He can evade the entire police squad at rush hour. It makes for some decent, halfway-believable car chases.
It also provides the necessary twist in this old saw plot about a good-hearted crook who tries to go straight, but keeps getting pulled back down. Even its romance is the stuff of pure pulp, uncomplicated and a little too perfect for reality, but it works for this fantasy world. Fresh-faced Ansel Elgort handily wins us over in the lead role. Kevin Spacey’s every line is almost laughably hard-boiled, but he sells it well. Jon Hamm and Eiza Gonzalez are a sexy criminal couple joined at the hip. The plum role though belongs to Jamie Foxx as the scariest person that Ipod Boy deals with on his heists. Foxx is a tightly wound ticking time bomb whose mood determines the temperature of his every scene. Best we can tell, he doesn’t even like music. Maybe it distracts him from his rage and he’d prefer to stay conscious of every bit of it. It’s a fine psycho performance.