A Fast Paced Masterpiece: Layer Cake
“You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you’re up in the rarefied atmosphere and you’ve forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son.”
Layer Cake, has a beginning like a Scorsese film. A charming middle man, played by Daniel Craig, lays out an introduction for the audience, on how the world of drugs work and commenting about the way drugs have been perceived in society historically. Craig’s character does not reveal his name, throughout the film, and his name is mentioned in the credits as XXXX. In the beginning of the film he is a man who is ahead of the curve, and he’s just about to leave it all behind, quit while he is ahead.
His retirement plan is cut short when he is summoned to a meeting with his boss, Jimmy Price, who asks him for two favors. One, to sort out an ecstasy deal that went wrong and find the daughter of his boss, Eddie Temple. Craig is in no mood to do either of these things, he just wants to retire. He delegates the task of finding the girl to a couple of his associates and proceeds to negotiate for the ecstasy deal.
The man dealing with the ecstasy deal, is Duke and during the negotiation XXXX finds out that he stole the pills from a Serbian criminal ring. The matter thickens when the Serbian gang puts out a hit on the Duke’s associates aka XXXX and crew. The ideal situation for Jimmy? Get the pills from the Duke and let the Serbs have him.
Layer cake, as the title suggests is a film that is as complex thriller, with a multitude of characters and events all occurring simultaneously. Another claim to fame for this cult classic is that it served as Craig’s audition tape to be the next Bond.
Mathew Vaughn, simply put, does a fantastic job on executing a plot that has countless twists, complex characters. But the real revelation in the film is Daniel Craig. In a film that is very dependent on the protagonist’s conviction to take the story forward, Daniel Craig does a fantastic job.
