If you're used to the Guy Ritchie films, Layer Cake will seem a little different. It's less funny, and much more darker than Snatch or Lock, Stock. This, however, is the film's strength. It almost feels as if the movie is based on pop. culture... although many films of this type are. The characters are all swaggering badasses with Cockney accents, but that's what British crime films are all about. It's really nothing you haven't seen before, with the exception of the brilliant final 20 minutes or so. Even as the film itself points out, it's very clever indeed.
XXXX (Daniel Craig) is a businessman, a perfectly legitimate one that is, whose commodity happens to be cocaine. He's been meticulous for his entire career, hasn't been caught, and he's about to retire, to get out of the game. This just doesn't happen when Jimmy, the boss, wants him to track down the daughter of one of his friends, another power player in the drug underworld. Complicating the matter is one million ecstacy pills stolen from a Serbian gang. It spirals out of control for XXXX, who does everything he can to remain on the top of the vicious circle before one of the bosses decides that it's his time to go.
The film has an excellent dramatic sense. Camera angles are important in these types of films, and the director, Matthew Vaughn, understands this. The camera is always focused on the mind of XXXX. As he watches a girl dance, everyone else at his table is blocked out by other dancers, giving the illusion that there is nothing in his mind but this dancing girl. In another scene, the camera zooms in close up to his eyes to highlight an important decision, when the camera zooms back out he's wearing an assassin's outfit. Vaughn also understands the need for quick and brutal violence, which can often be shocking. This is almost a trademark of films like this one, and he is able to pull it off effortlessly, and oftentimes spectacularly.
If you like crime movies in general, then this one is should be high up on your list. It's many times better than any American counterparts, and has many layers of twists and turns, of characters and intensity's. Layer Cake is the layers of life that a drug dealer must go through while he escapes the life. Try thinking about that for the whole movie, and the ending will seem even better.