Layer Cake (Widescreen)
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DVD details
Actor: Colm Meaney, Daniel Craig, Dexter Fletcher, Kenneth Cranham, Michael GambonBrand: SONY PICTURES HOME ENT
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Romanian (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.40:1
Running Time: 105 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-08-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Layer Cake (Widescreen)
DVD Review: a cool, assured spin on the neo-British gangster flick
Summary: 5 Stars
Like Fight Club, you never learn the name of the primary character -- played by Daniel Craig -- whose perspective Layer Cake portrays. (That is the ONLY thing it has in common with Fight Club, rest assured.)
Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch grabbed a lot of attention as neo British gangster flicks, breathing new life into an old genre. And they do deserve the hype, imo.
But Guy Ritchie's gangster films (except Revolver) have hearty senses of humour about themselves, as well as lots of gun wielding. Layer Cake and Sexy Beast (with an absolutely terrifying Ben Kingsley -- yes! -- as a psychotic head thug gangster) take themselves much more seriously, and therefore the violence that occurs is more viscerally affecting and less amusing and cartoonish.
As a result, you're a bit more invested in the characters of Layer Cake, and the payoff is therefore different and somewhat more satisfying. This isn't to say Layer Cake is humor-less -- it isn't. But the humor is more subtle than the Guy Ritchie flicks; it doesn't smack you in the face so much as nudge you and wink knowingly. It's less slapstick and more satirical and cynical.
Layer Cake has multiple intertwined stories because of the conflicting desires, motivations, and orders of the characters in the ensemble cast. The characters consist of higher up criminals who the Narrator (Craig, formally known as "XXXX" in the credits) sells drugs for, the Narrator himself, some corrupt law enforcement, and some amateur gangsters who want to jump into the big time. He's not at the bottom layer of the cake, but he's definitely got layers above him.
However, the basic premise is one we've seen before: career criminal plans to pull major job and then retire happily ever after. But, thanks to the greed and machinations of rivals, superiors, and law enforcement, and a special side job he's supposed to take care of, nothing goes as planned. Thus the completion of his plans and his life, let alone his happily-ever-after retirement, are in jeopardy.
The way that the plot manages to pull the rug out from under you with twists is not as important as the execution. The cinematography is gorgeous, the camera work is streamlined; not a shot is wasted, and almost everything shown is important to the plot later on.
I love the kind of film where you have to PAY ATTENTION to truly get what's going on, and this is Layer Cake. If you try to surf the net or do other things while having this on in the background, you probably won't be impressed. But if you actually sit down to WATCH it, without distractions, you'll find plot points and criss-crosses galore to keep you guessing.
Such a film doesn't have to perfectly resolve itself -- look at Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, with Bogart and Bacall -- but it's amazingly cool that it captivates your attention WITHOUT massive violence, explosions, and gunfire. I need this more now than ever before.
Maybe it's just me, but I've developed a sort of "blockbuster movie fatigue" caused by a steady diet of 90s-00s American blockbuster big budget films. They're always trying to top the one that came before with more/bigger special effects/CGI, tightly choreographed interpersonal violence/hand-to-hand combat, and some kind of large-scale mass destruction of big material objects or buildings, preferably employing major firepower and screeching metal.
Eddie Izzard jokes in "Dress To Kill" that the Brits are known for "the smaller films" like "A Room With A View of a Staircase and a Pond", but his comparison of British and American films is particularly apt (and if you've never seen it, Google for it on Youtube; it's hilarious, as is Eddie).
But I LIKE the fact that Layer Cake is tightly focused on what happens to a small, loyal crew of guys; I LIKE that the fate of the world or industrialized civilization doesn't "hang in the balance" -- like it unrealistically does in so many of those big, dumb, exciting blockbuster flicks. I LIKE that what Layer Cake has to say about the world, society and -- yes -- class can be told via the microcosm of the small(ish) world of the characters in the film.
And I like the fact that the career criminal played by Craig is entirely non-thug-like; when he has to resort to gun violence, it's nowhere near as blase as it is in American movies (which is probably at least one reason why, come to think of it, I suffer from blockbuster fatigue). It gives Layer Cake a definite non-American perspective.
(You *should* be upset by having to wield a gun or people around you doing so. Part of what's wrong here is that gun usage upsets no one and it's no big deal -- and consequently tons more people are killed by guns in the US, even when you adjust for population, than in other first-world nations. I know; I work in an inner city ER, where far too many kids under 20 come in with gunshot wounds. Every day in Chicago, once the weather gets warm, multiple people are getting shot, some fatally. Which is why we are the murder capital of the US off and on, as we were in the 90s, vying with NY, LA and Detroit for top honors of most homicides. Sigh. Ok, off soapbox now.)
Anyway, the (surprising?) humanity of the protagonist makes movies like Layer Cake and its characters so much more realistic than any blockbuster, despite all their stylized cool.
And cool it is. The ensemble cast is great. Craig's character's two right hand men are played by Colm Meaney (ST: TNG and ST: DS9, as well as many other UK and US productions), and George Harris (you've seen him if you watch BBC programs on PBS or BBC America; he's been in lots of stuff). One of the amateurs is played by Burn Gorman (Bleak House, Torchwood). The plotting is pretty tight, including flashbacks you think are pointless, but are NOT.
All in all, well worth your money for rental or purchase. If you like Lock, Stock and Snatch, you will probably like this. If you like Sexy Beast, you will almost certainly like Layer Cake.
And while I'm at it, I'll recommend In Bruges as well, although it's almost an anti-gangster gangster flick in setting and execution, at least 2/3-3/4 of the way through the film... but is still wildly entertaining.
There's more bathos in Guy Ritchie's flicks, and more pathos in Layer Cake, Sexy Beast, and (especially) In Bruges. But this is a genre I like -- neo-British gangster flicks -- and Layer Cake is an especially great specimen.
Note: if you are not a native of the United Kingdom, you may need to watch Layer Cake multiple times to get all the dialog... or else put the subtitles on (I did both). It stands up to repeat viewing, definitely.
Description of Layer Cake (Widescreen)
Planning to retire and begin a new life, Mr. X (Daniel Craig, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), a successful West End drug dealer, has been asked for one last favor: to negotiate the sale of one million hits of Ecstasy. Unfortunately for Mr. X, the pills were stolen from a Serbian drug lord who'll cut off his head if he sells them. And with a London crime czar (Michael Gambon, Open Range & The Insider) promising to retire him permanently if he doesn't, Mr. X may be rightfully concerned about his future. Nothing worth losing his head over.As its title suggests, Layer Cake is a crime thriller that cuts into several levels of its treacherous criminal underworld. The title is actually one character's definition of the drug-trade hierarchy, but it's also an apt metaphor for the separate layers of deception, death, and betrayal experienced by the film's unnamed protagonist, a cocaine traffic middle-man played with smooth appeal by Daniel Craig (rumored at the time of this film's release to be on the short list for consideration as the next James Bond). Listed in the credits only as "XXXX," the character is trapped into doing a favor for his volatile boss, only to have tables turned by his boss's boss (Michael Gambon) in a twisting plot involving a stolen shipment of Ecstasy, a missing girl, duplicitous dealers, murderous Serbian gangsters, and a variety of lowlifes with their own deadly agendas. As adapted by J.J. Connolly (from his own novel) and directed by Matthew Vaughan (who earned his genre chops as producer of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), Layer Cake improves upon those earlier British gangland hits with assured pacing, intelligent plotting, and an admirable emphasis on plot-moving dialogue over routine action. Sure, it's violent (that's to be expected) and not always involving, but it's smarter than most thrillers, and Vaughan's directorial debut has a confident style that's flashy without being flamboyant. This could be the start of an impressive career. --Jeff Shannon
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