Layer Cake (2004)

Matthew Vaughn & J.J. Connolly's Layer Cake is undoubtedly a British gangster film. However, it is not by default a good film. Hodges’s Get Carter (1971) starring Michael Caine is a close comparison in terms of genre, its final shot & a preoccupation with close-ups of it’s leading man pondering ambiguously at the camera. I must admit that no English-made gangster film has been able to rival their American forebears in Hollywood films starring James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Al Pacino. London-born Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000) does operate in this crime genre, but it’s salient cinematic quality rests in Ray Winstone’s likeable, sympathetic character and it’s generally character-driven story; it is also a much simpler plot with the “good” guys drawn contrastingly against the bad men. Layer Cake fails as a cohesive film because there’s an inconsistency between the tone of its exposition and the rest of the story. The narrative flows with an uneven rhythm, unintentionally.

For the moment, I am inclined to think that the British gangster film is certainly not to my taste & I wonder how much this owes to their heritage in this industry-driven art. I cannot help but think of Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts & Coronets (1949) when I contemplated the anti-climatic ending to Layer Cake. The former is a heavily-narrated black comedy whose final twist is wickedly funny & quintessentially English in it’s dead pan tenor. However, the impassive tone in the final moments of Layer Cake is nothing more than an inglorious conclusion. As a reading & film viewing public sensitive to moral social messages ranging from billboards to toilet-stall readers, the protagonist’s sudden, traumatic downturn is jarring but redundant. If you must fetishize over images of Daniel Craig again after
Casino Royale (2006), be informed.