Layer Cake

Synopsis:  A middle-man (Daniel Craig) in the British drug trade who has made a tidy pile wants to get out but finds that that isn’t so easy.

Whilst the "From the makers of..." banner flourished in the marketing campaign of any movie is intended to act as a guarantee of more of what you liked before, it also raises the spectre of the law of diminishing returns. Matthew Vaughn's film pretty much satisfies both perspectives. It is a reasonably entertaining re-configuration of the Cockney villain/wide-boy crime caper scenario with plot twists galore, instigated by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (on which Vaughn was a producer, as he was for its follow-up, Snatch), that by virtue of not really introducing anything new ends up, whatever immediate thrills it offers, being a rather forgettable descendant to its forebears.

Vaughn, working from a script by J.J. Connolly (who based it on his novel of the same name) keeps the pace brisk but as we've seen this rogues' gallery in action before, has to find something new to do with the material to lift it above the "yeah, so?'' response. Hence there's some nice camerawork and editing to visually engage, there's a sexy bimbo (Sienna Miller) to titillate and noted character actor who must be just shy of a peerage, Michael Gambon (looking like he's been made up with half a tin of Nugget), is introduced to the cast to lend some gravitas to the less-than-tasteful proceedings of our motley crew. Daniel Craig (soon to take up the mantle of James Bond) in his unnamed role as the narrator and main protagonist is a sympathetic character but as written or played is either a little too mild-mannered to be mixed up with the kind of colleagues he has or keeps too bad company to be as decent as he is.

The plot, as one expects, turns this way and that and by the end, is doing so so rapidly that one has barely time to think about the plausibility of one set-up before the next one is upon us. Some of it is too easy to anticipate and for my money the final scene, whilst potentially effective, was squandered. As a contemporary gangster movie, Layer Cake is of the packet variety, but if you're in the mood for some romanticised South London thuggery it does the job quite well.

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