Once upon a time, long before irreverent Neil Gaiman adaptations, psychotic twelve year-old vigilantes and groovy X-Men movies set in the swinging sixties, Matthew Vaughn was Guy Richie’s producer and helped him steer Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and… um, Swept Away in front of cameras and onto screens. However, it seemed that Vaughn himself had quite the hankering to direct himself, and so in 2004, he attempted to break away from the stylish, hip, Guy Ritchie crime movie template in order to – well, create his own stylish, hip crime movie template in the form of Layer Cake.
I have to be honest, British cinema at that time had been mercilessly lambasted with more gangster films that Martin Scorsese’s filmography, and most of them were either Lock, Stock… rip offs or the kind of violent thug-a-thons that usually has everybody calling each other a slag, so my expectations for Layer Cake wasn’t exactly high. However, little did I know that Vaughn had adjusted the recipe a little differently than his peers.
Sauve, disciplined, unnamed cocaine dealer – we’ll just refer to him as XXXX – has a plan in place and intends to stick to it in order to secure a nice, healthy, early retirement. While he sells his white, powdery waters, he ensured that he sticks rigidly to his personal set of rules as to not jeopardise his business, his money and – of course – his life.
However, crime bosses aren’t usually known to sticking to the rules as so one day, XXXX is summoned to have lunch with the mobbed-up Jimmy Price who declares he has a couple of jobs for him. The first is that he has to track down Charlie, the drugged-up, runaway daughter of one of his more powerful associates and the other is to oversee the sale of over one million ecstasy tablets that have procured innate very dodgy fashion by wide boy wild card, “The Duke”, a low-level criminal who runs around with his cadre of thugs like it’s the wild west. Needless to say, XXXX is highly resistant to stepping outside his comfort zone, but when a scary crime boss asks, a scary crime boss gets.
Despite having his own crew to back him up that includes his enforcer, Morty and his liaison with Jimmy, the fiercely loyal Gene, things turn to shit almost immediately. Firstly, XXXX finds out from his sources that Charlie isn’t just missing, she’s been kidnapped and secondly, the ecstasy shipment brought in by the Duke haven’t exactly been procured by honest means as the nutcase simply jacked it at gunpoint from a gang of Serbian war criminals and have dropped his name into the mix.
Running around and trying to furiously tie up lose ends while not getting murdered by a Serbian hitman known only as Dragan, XXXX eventually starts to see the sheer size of the hook he’s dangling on after a visit with high-level crime lord Eddie Temple, who clues him up on the fact that his retirement may not be entirely forthcoming…
To elaborate while doubling down on an earlier point, while I was fully a fan of the “mockney ganster” japes of Guy Richie’s Lock, Stock… and Snatch, everything movie that subsequently tried to leap on the bandwagon usually got well and truly on my tits in no time at all. If it wasn’t some cheeky, farcical comedy thriller that obnoxiously winked at the audience to a merciless degree then it was the type of brutal hooligan movie that glamorised law breaking anti-hero to an uncomfortable degree. However, Vaughn is far too savvy a filmmaker to fall into either one of those two traps and instead made sure that Layer Cake was something that both contained style and substance along with the usual lineup of eccentric characters and rousing needle drops.
Thus – much like the title denotes – Layer Cake proves to be a slick, complex, and – yes – layered affair that largely eschews broad, stereotypical caricatures and jokey situations in favor of something much more refined. Oh, the basic crime-movie formula is certainly still there, as Vaughn and co. do their damnedest to make their unnamed protagonist live a hugely desirable life as he surfs just out of reach of the more nastier criminal element. To be fair, it’s not really that hard to make a lucrative criminal life seem seductive as a particularly attractive vampire, especially considering it comes complete with flash suits and an opportunity to sidle up to a fresh faced Sienna Miller, but Vaughn does a noticable more refined job than most, letting the rewards speak for itself rather than indulging in an orgy of excess.
Helping this immensely is a breakout performance from Daniel Craig who, after a career of memorable character roles in the likes of Munich and Road To Perdition, puts in an attention demanding turn as the movie’s unnamed protagonist. While throwing around the whole James Bond thing whenever Craig’s name is mentioned is rather predictable, you can really see the beginnings of his journey to playing 007 here as he mixes super slick confidence with an air of vunerablitly as his world flips like a pancake made of class A drugs. Simply put, alongside Vaughns measured visuals, Craig is the movie and he commands the screen with a confident swagger.
Everyone and everything else is gravy. There’s early roles for impossibly young looking, future thespians like an underused Tom Hardy, Ben Wishlaw and an uzi waving Sally Hawkins; there’s your usual Guy Richie/Matthew Vaughn regulars like Dexter Fletcher and Jason Flemying and there’s minted acting stalwarts like Kenneth Cranham, Colm Meaney and Michael Gambon filling out the cast nicely; and the brief but spirited spots of violence (soon to be a Vaughn speciality) are memorable with a novel use for an iron being a particular standout.
However, if there’s a flaw in Layer Cake’s plan it that it often ends up out smarting itself when it comes to pushing through its gargantuan plot. While crime epics need – nay, deserve – sprawling casts, there’s just too many moving parts here for the relatively short running time to effectively handle and there’s many a time when whole characters literally wander off screen to vanish for large chunks of screen time only to casually wander back. Also, Jamie Foreman’s screaming, cap wearing Duke literally feels like he’s strutted in from Vaughn’s Ritchie days and while he’s supposed to be at odds with the slick goings on of the rest of the movie, it’s too obvious a joke and you’d rather the film had given it to the younger actors like Hardy, Hawkins or Whishaw instead.
Still, from its enticing opening to its brutal and sudden denouement, Layer Cake constantly justifies its existence in a very crowded market by being a twisty, turny treat.
Maybe not top tier, but damn close.
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