Layer Cake **** (2004, Daniel Craig, Kenneth Cranham, Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller, Sally Hawkins, Nathalie Lunghi) – Classic Movie Review 660

Daniel Craig stars as a London-based criminal who wants to quit the cocaine business, in debut director Matthew Vaughn’s better-than-most 2004 British crime film Layer Cake.

Another day, another Brit crime thriller, but this one from 2004 is quite a lot better than most. Daniel Craig stars as a drug dealer who has made his pile and is planning to quit the cocaine racket.

But his mob boss Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) wants him to tidy up a few things first, like find the missing rich daughter of Jimmy’s old pal Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon). And naturally there’s a mountain of drugs and two or three girls (Sienna Miller, Sally Hawkins, Nathalie Lunghi) in the picture. too.

Craig gives a commanding star turn and the very good Brit cast flesh out their familiar roles, with Kenneth Cranham and particularly Michael Gambon on excellent form as friendly rival bosses. And both the cast and imaginative first-time director Matthew Vaughn certainly make much out of a robust and boisterous but rather average, predictable screenplay by J J Connolly, based on his 2000 novel.

The flashy-looking film-making style works pretty well, too, in Ben V Davis’s eye-catchingly striking cinematography, making much of its London locations (and Amsterdam too). Matthew Vaughn ensures his film is super-slick, highly energised and quite intense and often thrilling, with an exciting soundtrack to help pump adrenaline. It’s a bad karma movie and quite nasty in many places. After all it is a gangster film. And there is some high-level violence of the disreputable designer violence sort, with a high body count. It’s British Tarantino.

Debut director Vaughn is the producer of Guy Ritchie’s movies, as well as the 2001 film Mean Machine, so it is not surprising that this is very much in their vein. Ritchie had planned to direct but was busy.

The Bond producers liked what they saw here and cast Craig as their new 007 in Casino Royale (2006). Craig’s character here is hardly James Bond, though his fit, confident, slightly arrogant, slightly superior swagger maybe suggests a 007 thing. Craig’s character is unnamed and is credited as XXXX.

Tom Hardy, Colm Meaney, Dexter Fletcher, Jamie Foreman, Tamer Hassan, Jason Flemyng and Ben Whishaw – Q to Craig’s 007 in Skyfall (2012), Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021) – are also in the strong cast. Meaney has a lot of stuff to do, all on the meany side, and Whishaw has a nice, quite showy little weasley support role. It’s a lads’ film, a blokes’ movie of the Loaded generation, and the women have fairly insignificant, dismissive roles, with Sienna Miller merely decorative, though remarkably so, and Sally Hawkins awkwardly playing a jittery cockney crazy, handy. or not very handy, with a gun.

The title refers to the layers anyone in business goes through in rising to the top. In the penultimate scene at the Stokes country club, Craig and the drug dealers are eating a layer cake.

It grossed $11.9 million at the box office against a budget of $6.5 million.

Top 20 British heist movies

The cast are Daniel Craig as XXXX, Colm Meaney as Gene, George Harris as Morty, Sienna Miller as Tammy, Tamer Hassan as Terry, Jamie Foreman as the Duke, Kenneth Cranham as Jimmy Price, Michael Gambon as Eddie Temple, Ben Whishaw as Sidney, Tom Hardy as Clarkie, Dexter Fletcher as Cody, Steve John Shepherd as Tiptoes, Burn Gorman as Gazza, Sally Hawkins as Slasher, Marcel Iureș as Slavo, Louis Emerick as Trevor, Stephen Walters as Shanks, Francis Magee as Paul the boatman, Dragan Mićanović as Dragan, Nathalie Lunghi as Charlie, Jason Flemyng as Crazy Larry, Matt Ryan as Junkie 2, Ivan Kaye as Freddie Hurst, Daniel Moorehead as Dizzy, and Paul Orchard as Lucky.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 660

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