Layer Cake

I see lots of bad movies. Most of them, you recognize they're bad, you either finish them out of curiosity or turn them off, and you move on with your day. But every once in a while, you see a movie that's so bad, so shallow, so completely devoid of import or value of any kind, it signals the death of not just a single creative enterprise, but of an entire genre.

With Layer Cake, director Matthew Vaughn officially declares the British ensemble gangster comedy a dead genre. That's it. Nothing more to see here, folks. Time to go home.

Vaughn produced Guy Ritchie's twin hits Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, that helped define the modern British crime film, and I guess he wanted a taste of his own. Regrettably, his adaptation of J. J. Connelly's novel about the inner workings of the drug trade, scripted by the author himself, has none of the spastic wit or vitality of Ritchie's films. In fact, it has nothing going for it at all really. A lot of flashy shots stolen from better movies, an abrasive electronica-heavy soundtrack and a dull, muted central performance from Daniel Craig add up to a dreary, uninteresting distraction of a film.



Honestly, this formula has just been played out. Until someone finds a way of reinventing the setting of London's interconnected underworld of criminals and scumbags, no one should bother making one of these movies.

Layer Cake piles silly convention on top of silly convention. There's the tough guy protagonist, a criminal mastermind looking to get out of the drug game and go straight. There's his no-nonsense partner, hardened by years in jail. There are the assorted spazzes, junkies and fuck-ups with goofy nicknames, there to provide comic relief and plot complications. And finally, there's the "big score," a cache of ecstacy tablets over which everyone is fighting.

Yawn. We've seen all this before. I think Vaughn senses that he's beating a horse that's been dead for months, because he's constantly trying to jazz up the movie with bizarre camera tricks. This would be fine, if all of his visual concepts weren't lifted directly from other recent crime films.

There's the guy being brutally beaten in first-person, taken from Gangster #1. Only in this case, rather than hearing the sound of bones cracking and flesh being torn apart, we get the ironic musical selection of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World." Har!

Then there's the blurry Steadicam foot chase, a la Narc. The conversation during which a camera swoops around a table repeatedly at jarring speeds, from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. A close-up on a dilated pupil right after a character does drugs (as in Requiem for a Dream and 500 other films). Vaughn is even bold enough to directly borrow one of the trademark sequences in Fight Club, replacing Ed Norton's trip inside an IKEA catalog with Daniel Craig moseying around an effects-laden pharmacy.

Why bother making this film? The story is drab and uneventful, in that we're told Craig's character (whose name is never spoken) is a complete badass yet he's never called upon to do much of anything. The dialogue is standard gangster-speak without even an attempt at the snappy wordplay of Ritchie's films. And the double-cross at the film's heart isn't much of a double-cross. Characters here don't so much outwit one another so much as bring along guys with larger guns.

In the movie's most ludicrous segment, Craig's character dresses up like a ninja in order to sneak up on (and murder) an old man. It was as I watched this action unfold that I decided this genre is totally dead. Once you're relying on a gimmick that lame, there's just nowhere else to go.