Layer Cake (2004)
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
When a seemingly straight-forward drug deal goes awry, XXXX has to break his die-hard rules and turn up the heat, not only to outwit the old regime and come out on top, but to save his own skin...
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10 films that influenced Layer Cake
What critics say influenced Layer Cake
Like the Guy Ritchie films, and a number of other Brit gangster pictures of recent vintage, "Layer Cake" owes an obvious debt to Martin Scorsese's 1990 "Goodfellas."
Like Scorsese's " Casino " and " GoodFellas ," the British crime movie "Layer Cake" opens with a narration describing a criminal world made in heaven.
The result is one of the freshest takes on the crime world since Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas.
As he talks to us in voice-over, confiding the tricks of the trade (and his secret plan to leave it all behind) with a seductive aplomb that recalls Ray Liotta's at the kickoff of GoodFellas, we think: This guy knows it all ? the odds and the angles.
If Guy Ritchie�s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was the cinematic equivalent of his native England�s Britpop movement, and his Snatch paralleled Tony Blair�s Cool Britannia marketing scheme, then Layer Cake, directed by Ritchie�s longtime producer Vaughn, is an ultracool ricochet backward to the swinging era of Carnaby Street and any number of exquisite King's Cross clothiers.
In Layer Cake, a slick limey caper from the producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, British-born Daniel Craig proves that he's got the strength, sophistication and brawny sex appeal to carry 007's license to kill, if only Hollywood would consider the fair-haired hunk.
Layer Cake is the latest in the recent cluster of British gangster/caper films begun by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
His narration is terse and snappy, the underlying images smart and aggressive, full of quick pans and smashup editing (in the manner of, say, Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, both produced by this film's first-time director Matthew Vaughn).
Layer Cake (the title has more to do with fecal matter than with baked goods) aspires to that model, but it�s drawn more to the stylized contrivance that made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels a hit � no surprise given that director Matthew Vaughan produced Barrels.
Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn were the director/producer team behind cult British gangland movies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.
Another favorite film I'd liken Layer Cake to is To Live and Die in L.A., William Friedkin's oft-overlooked buddy cop masterpiece from the '80s.
Once one of the most dependable ?xes in cinema, the British crime genre has taken some serious hits lately, with the no-nonsense grit of The Long Good Friday and Get Carter giving way to sub-Tarantinoid ?ash.
Like a cross between The French Connection and The Long Good Friday, Layer Cake seems less concerned with romanticizing the criminal life than in demonstrating how fates can turn on their way to the top.
The British gangster films Get Carter and The Long Good Friday were built on hard-boiled characters caught in situations that pushed their code of honor.
It aspires to the same lofty heights as the classic “The Long Good Friday” and doesn’t quite hit the mark.
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While Gene demonstrates his ferocity on XXXX's face, following what turns out to be a minor betrayal, Morty occasions the film's stop-the-show piece, when he loses his mind (apparently) with an ex-prison mate, and takes after him with a teapot (think: The Big Heat, with more macho posturing, less Lee Marvinish hysteria).
It's softer than Jonathan Glazer's fabulously decadent Sexy Beast (most of that due, no doubt, to there being no baddie the equivalent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Vaughn's film) and more coherent than Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1 , but it slips snug into the same conversation.
The movie comes from some of the same people who brought us the dark comic "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," but it's more akin to "Sexy Beast," a considerably nastier, less likeable film.
Like a cross between The French Connection and The Long Good Friday, Layer Cake seems less concerned with romanticizing the criminal life than in demonstrating how fates can turn on their way to the top.
Vaughn, the producer of Guy Ritchie's "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," "Snatch" and "Swept Away" (we're going to have to forgive him that last one), mines a similar milieu to the first two films and shows a real talent for dealing with antiheroes (for which he has been rewarded with the assignment of directing the upcoming "X-Men 3").
Matthew Vaughan, producer behind the entire Guy Ritchie oeuvre ( Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels , Snatch , and… er… Swept Away ), makes his directorial debut with Layer Cake, another tale from the British criminal underworld that thankfully avoids any association with aging pop icons.
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Original music by Ilan Eshkeri ("Black Hawk Down") and Lisa Gerrard ("Gladiator") is inventive, with XXXX's first hit accompanied by music that sounds like "The Silence of the Lambs" score gone techno.
In other words, there are layers to "Layer Cake," and twists enough to please even folks who haven't been pleased since they saw "The Usual Suspects."