Layer Cake Movie Review:


Guy Ritchie's producer Vaughn takes a stab at directing ... with yet another vicious-yet-witty British crime thriller. While it's visually striking, with superior acting, it's also cluttered with a bewildering collection of characters and plot threads.

Craig stars as an unnamed mid-level drug-dealing mobster who just wants to make enough money to retire early. But when he gets involved in a convoluted gang war between two bosses (Gambon and Cranham) and several factions of henchmen, he must navigate the multiple layers of the mob to make sure the right people end up with a missing shipment of E. But people are dying all around him, and it's going to get even more gruesome if he doesn't make everyone happy soon. If that's even possible.

It's a good story, but in adapting his own novel Connolly seems unwilling to part with even one minor character, jamming each vivid personality quirk into the script. On screen this is just too much! Too many people bouncing off each other in crowded, chaotic scenes. We can follow the main guys (at least those played by recognisable stars), but everyone else blurs into a cacophony around the edges. This may be quite realistic, but it makes it impossible to engage with anyone.

Vaughn has a strong visual sense--the direction and design are inventive and playful. The opening sequence is especially snappy, stylishly explaining the set-up until the plot kicks in and muddies it up beyond comprehension. But along the way there are wonderful moments--powerful scenes, hilarious mayhem, terrific lines of dialog. And the cast is excellent. Craig is a strong physical presence, as charismatic as always, and so good that we wish we could feel his emotional highs and lows. Of the superb, sprawling supporting cast, Gambon and Meaney get the best moments. So it's too bad that the story is such a bore! It's just a collection of plots and counterplots surrounded by brutal assaults and comical ineptness. While some sequences work brilliantly, others that obviously should mean something fall flat. In the end it just feels tedious. And pointless.

Rich Cline

It may be an easy way to make money but the drug business is a very precarious and dangerous one. While you may think about yourself as nothing more than a businessman, there are others that see it as a way of gaining power and respect, with no one getting in their way of achieving this. As with all businesses there are different levels of power and when an order comes down from on high, you won’t get fired if you fail, you’ll be killed. Welcome to the Layer Cake.

Producer Matthew Vaughn moves behind the camera and moves into the same territory as his long time collaborator Guy Ritchie, the British crime movie but can he make something very different. The answer is yes.

Moving as far away from Ritchie’s in your face, fast edit, comedic approach as he could possibly get, Vaughn brings us a realistic, stylish look at the criminal underworld and his hieratical structure. This is a gritty, no holds barred approach that shows the life, how you’d imagine it. This is a world populated by powerful men who are consumed by ambition and greed to move higher up the criminal ladder.

At the bottom we have the wannabe’s, the wide-boys looking for that big deal that will set them up and make their names known. The next layer contains the businessmen, the ones who have gained the respect of their peers and are earning a nice, tidy profit. After that is we have the captain’s, the bosses who demand a share of the profits for the goods that they provide. These are the big players, the men who pull a lot of the strings. At the very top we have the crime lords, the ultimate criminal power. These are the men who over see it all, demanding their share of the profits and ruling the roost with power and violence. This is the layer cake of the title.

Matthew Vaughn has gathered together an excellent ensemble cast to portray the differing layers of the criminal cake. The much underrated and always excellent Daniel Craig plays the protagonist of the piece. Acting as both star and narrator, Craig excels in a role that showcases the full range of his skills. This is a character that wants to get out of a business that he sees as very short term. He is very good at what he does, a fact that doesn’t go unnoticed in the echelons of criminal power, so leaving might not be as simple as he thinks. Even though the character is a criminal, Craig makes him very likeable to the point that you actually want him to succeed, even though you shouldn’t.

Jamie Foreman plays the Duke, the type of criminal you’d expect to inhabit the bottom layer. Over barring, loud and starving for power, The Duke is a man with big ideas but hasn’t got the intelligence to realise them. Not with getting himself and his associates higher up the ladder into a lot of trouble. Foreman excels in parts like this, creating characters that are instantly dislikeable.
If you wanted someone to play a British crime lord, you could do no better than the always-superb Michael Gambon. He plays the role with a real zeal, making the character grab your attention from the off, commanding respect. This is a man who you wouldn’t mess with or betray.

The rest of the ensemble is also good. Colm Meaney makes a great, no holds barred henchman. Tamer Hassan proves some comic relief as Daniel Craig’s muscle and Dexter Fletcher shows again that he deserves more chances on the silver screen.
Layer Cake is not the kind of British Gangster movie you might have been expecting from the producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, in fact it shouldn’t even be associated with those films. The movie stands on its own as a gritty and entertaining work, which gives a more truthful insight into the London crime scene. While the story may loose you slightly in the final act, too many plot threads and not enough time to tie them all up, this is still a great example of the genre and a promising start for another talented, British director.

Star Rating = * * * *

Jamie Kelwick

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