Still, if Wright’s brush with Marvel took the wind out of his sails, there’s no sign of it in Baby Driver – his frenetic homage to the crime thrillers of the 70s and 80s. In essence, it’s The Driver mixed with the fizzy, amped-up tone of Wright’s adaptation of Scott Pilgrim. Or, to put it another way, it’s a kind of action musical: La La Land with a V8 engine and shotguns. The plot’s familiar thriller stuff, as Baby pledges to do the archetypal “one last heist” for Doc before he settles down to a regular job and, potentially, a quiet life with his new girlfriend, waitress Debora (Lily James). That Baby’s partners in crime are the permanently wired Buddy (Jon Hamm) and the downright psychotic Bats (Jamie Foxx) means that the entire plan is constantly on a knife-edge. It’s the kind of premise that could form a straight-to-DVD action thriller, but Wright (who writes as well as directs) brings enough style, heart and hip direction to make Baby Driver something far more individual. First, there’s the time spent on making Baby a character worth rooting for: vulnerable yet athletic, handsome yet at the same time geeky: when he isn’t driving a car sidways, he also has a strange penchant for recording bits of conversation and then turning them into experimental pieces of electronic music. As heady and upbeat as Baby Driver is, the film is also remarkably violent and gruesome at times – little to surprise to fans of Shaun Of The Dead, perhaps, but potentially a shock to audiences who, having seen the trailers, might be expecting a knockabout action caper. But just when things threaten to get as dark as some of the films Wright evidently loves – The Driver (Walter Hill even gets a blink and you’ll miss him cameo), Michael Mann’s Heat or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive – the movie pulls us back. This means that, although Jon Hamm and Jamie Foxx are scary enough – Hamm firmly slamming the door on his clean-cut Don Draper years here – Baby Driver remains an upbeat popcorn movie (John Landis’ cult classic Blues Brothers may have also been an influence on Wright’s mix of music and mayhem). Indeed, beneath all the designer violence and pounding music, Baby Driver’s good natured to the point of being almost quaint. Not all the plot choices are necessarily the right ones – there’s a glaring reliance on coincidence, and Paul Williams, who plays a flamboyant gun runner, spends so long talking about pork and bacon in his lone scene that it starts to feel like a joke at Jon Hamm’s expense. Jon Bernthal, and another character who we won’t name, are also disappointingly underused, and the action sequences in the final reel lack some of the scale and imagination of the earlier ones. Baby Driver is out in UK cinemas on the 28th June.