SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Baby Driver. If you have not yet seen the film, please bookmark this page and return after your screening!
By the end of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, the major stars of the movie are all reunited, with Jamie Foxx's Bats, Jon Hamm's Buddy, and Eiza Gonzales' Darling teaming up with Ansel Elgort's Baby and Kevin Spacey's Doc for a daring post office heist. It makes sense as a group, given that they are the biggest stars in the cast, but there is one notable individual missing: Jon Bernthal's Griff. So what happened to this sunglasses-wearing hardcore operator? Well, based on his last lines, I think it's fair to assume that the guy is dead as a doornail somewhere.
As Edgar Wright has proven time and time again in his work (both in film and television), he is a master of foreshadowing, and here he's created a stellar time-release joke for Baby Driver. As the movie plays out, you watch as the heist teams Doc sets up change rosters -- a nod to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs -- and you don't really think much about Griff after he leaves the screen since the idea is to never organize the exact same group of thieves twice. It's not really until you're thinking about the movie later on and wondering about what happened to Griff that you get the punchline: Griff's last line is, "If you don't see me again, I'm dead."
It's a great example of Edgar Wright's detail-oriented approach to filmmaking, and it's a big part of what makes his movies so enjoyable to re-watch again and again. For example, both Shaun of the Dead and The World's End have full sequences dedicated to telling the audience exactly how the entire story is going to play out. The writer/director doesn't go that far in Baby Driver, but the "Griff Is Dead" joke is far from the only excessively smart gag (as you'll discover when you realize that the rainbow at the end of the movie is a callback to the lyrics in the Dolly Parton song that are recited when Baby is talking with the clerk at the post office).
Of course, considering that Edgar Wright has been talking openly about Baby Driver 2 possibilities, it isn't currently off the table that Griff isn't really dead yet, and is instead just waiting for his opportunity to pop back into action. In fact, Griff's last line basically transforms him into a Schrödinger's cat: we won't know if he's really alive or dead until we open the box.
Now that Baby Driver is turning out to be a surprising success at the box office, we may hear more news about Baby Driver 2 before too long -- but before then, we definitely recommend checking out the film again on the big screen. We can promise you an incredibly rewarding experience.
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