REVIEWED - LAYER CAKE: You may have noticed an iron featuring prominently on the posters for Layer Cake. Knowing that this is a London gangster movie, you may well have concluded that the iron is an implement of pain employed in the movie - which it is, along with a pot of scalding hot tea and even some old-fashioned bullets.
Par for the course, you might imagine, but the surprise is that, although originally to be directed by Guy Ritchie, the movie is altogether more serious in tone and intent than his wackier guns 'n' geezers japes. What hasn't changed is that Layer Cake is rooted in an environment populated by wholly amoral characters, established and aspirant operators in the drugs underworld.
It's only a matter of time before that world goes legal and mainstream, muses the pivotal character - who is unnamed, refered to as XXXX in the closing credits and played with steely resolve by Daniel Craig. His theory is illustrated as the camera glides over a store full of fcuk-branded bottles of ecstasy and cocaine, ready to be bought off the shelf.
"I'm not a gangster, but a businessman who deals in the commodity of cocaine," insists XXXX, as he reels off his credos: always know and respect your enemy (the police) and stay away from the end users, who are guaranteed to cause trouble. Wealthy, well-dressed and nearing the top tier in the layer cake of professional success, XXXX is planning an early retirement when that venerable movie gangster staple, One Last Job, inevitably crops up and starts throwing frustrating curve-balls at his precisely ordered way of life and business.
Mobster Jimmy Price demands two favours from him. One is on behalf of a powerful criminal (Michael Gambon), whose cocaine-addicted daughter, a Patty Hearst type, has fallen in with bad company and gone missing. The other is to intervene when a loose cannon crook commandeers a huge shipment of ecstasy.
The screenplay by J.J. Connolly, adapted from his own début novel, surrounds the protagonists with a profusion of other characters in a densely plotted screenplay that proves needlessly indigestible and confusing at times.
The movie is more adept in contending with the sheer familiarity of its dramatis personae and their exploits after so many inane Lock, Stock cash-in efforts. Vaughn (who produced Ritchie's Snatch and Lock, Stock) situates the drama in a sleekly designed milieu that maximises offbeat London locations. He also plays to the strengths of the film's neatest narrative twists and its high-calibre cast, in which Craig, Gambon and Colm Meaney raise the bar for recent excursions into this genre.
