Bank robbery, as a category of subject matter, can be regarded as a stand-alone school in crime movies. There are many movies of this kind of theme, and the style elements are also very wide. Some are extremely popular (such as "Bank Robbery"), deep literary (such as "Hot Day Afternoon"), and black and humorous (such as "Flycatcher") , Tear-jerking ("Grandma Robbers"), rebellious (such as "Bonnie and Clyde"). As the most important part of the country’s financial system, the bank is undoubtedly a symbol that transcends personal power and daily life, and represents a more powerful force and will. The robbers as the protagonist are confronted and conflicted with this force. It also showed an extremely dramatic situation and meaning. So generally speaking, in this type of story, the protagonist is the robber, and the main action conflict comes from the confrontation between the robber and the people in the banking system.
And this is precisely the novel and different place of "The God of Car Hire" in this kind of subject matter.
The protagonist of this film is not only a robber who robbed him, but also a boy with a baby face. This contrast established a new expectation at the beginning of the movie, and brought the audience to a movie-watching experience full of unknown interest. Next, we discovered that the man who drove for the robber was not only responsible for driving, but was not so close to other robbers. This broke our expectations of this type again, because in that sense In short, he is not a robber in a traditional bank robbery story. The role of the driver is not only often simplified in traditional stories, but also usually irrelevant, without too much pen and ink. And the baby-faced boy gave his identity a kind of misty temperament. If he is a robber, you definitely can't believe it. This deliberately created sense of detachment hinted to the audience from the beginning: this is by no means a traditional bank robbery story.
Not only that, in this story, it is not the banking system that confronts the male protagonist, but the robbers who threaten him to help in the robbery. The highly skilled boy was forced to help the robbers escape from the police, and the reason he got into this situation was a history that was not clearly explained in the movie. The construction of this kind of story relationship reminds me of martial arts stories instinctively. Yes, this is actually a martial arts story with bank robberies and drag racing scenes. A thief with a stunt but involuntarily meets a girl in his wandering life, which illuminates his life. But the rivers and lakes are ruthless, he didn't dare to complain to the girl, just maintained an ambiguous relationship. However, when his heart moved, the gods and Buddha could not persuade him, and the thief began to shake his life. When he thought that he could retreat to the rivers and lakes and live his beloved girl, the storms of the rivers and lakes found him again. This time, not only had a relationship with him, but even threatened his beloved girl. The thief could only come out again, but because his heart was weak, he caused a catastrophe and was hunted down. In order not to affect his beloved girl, the thief had to travel far away. The girl just waited and waited, five years later, finally, the hero came back, this time, he can finally retreat completely...
If such a contextual change is made, the model of the story becomes very clear. In fact, what is more similar to the martial arts story is that the male protagonist also has a small dream, a dream that is completely different from his identity and skills: driving on the intercontinental highway with a girl he likes to listen to a song. This is really not a technical problem for a driver with a stunt. But because of the environment and the mistakes he made in the past, he has been unable to realize this dream. It was only until the end of the film that the director gave us a little sign of hope.
Having said this, we can clearly see that this is not a Jin Yong type of martial arts story, but a typical ancient dragon type of martial arts story. Jin Yong's martial arts talk about small people becoming heroes, Gu Long said that heroes also have small dreams. Therefore, very similar to Gu Long’s story, the film is also full of romantic renderings and descriptions, while relatively weakening the realistic storyline. Whether it's the music layout from beginning to end, the dazzling shot scheduling and movement, the use and highlighting of iconic props... all of them are creating this romantic tone. And because of this, it brings an unreal but still powerful stimulus to the film. And the "tone" of the baby-faced male protagonist, that is, his music player, his sunglasses, his jeans and shoes, all together shape the image of the character. This character image is like a trademark and is also a symbol in itself. There will also be the criticized "not full and three-dimensional" problem. Fortunately, his little dream injected soul into this symbol, giving this abstract definition some very concrete content.
From this point of view, this is also the difference between this film and other bank robbery stories. It explains very weakly the motivation of the characters, because it is not the key, but it fully explains and interprets the ideals of the characters, because it involves the establishment of the character's image. Therefore, in the movie, the bridge segment of robbing the bank becomes purely an action paragraph, losing its deeper meaning. Generally speaking, robbing the bank has become a less important thing, which can be replaced by other criminal acts. Therefore, the confrontation between criminals and the banking system has completely lost the sense of existence, and has completely become a screen depicting the blood and blood of the rivers and lakes.
Overall, this is a commercial film with strong visual and style music. However, it mischievously made some breakthroughs in the genre requirements of commercial films. The baby-faced male protagonist is the biggest contribution of this film to the bank robbery genre, and we can even imagine exploring the combination of this genre of stories and youth films. The romantic passages make this movie greatly weaken the bloody and real sense of the story, and bring the style and meaning of some fashion-themed movies. Although these elements seem to be buoyant, the little dream still allows the audience to capture the realistic part of this distorted reality display. And this is the most magical part of the movie illusion: although the story is based on the illusion, although the story is the story of the heroes, we still see ourselves and the little dream in our hearts from it.
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