Very disappointing...

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

I was certainly expecting more from this film and I was slightly disappointed to be honest. The story seemed interesting at the beginning, but as it branches out into multiple threads it loses focus and becomes more convoluted. Snatch is a much better example of managing multiple story threads without it becoming too confusing.However, the acting is excellent, particularly from Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney and George Harris. Michael Gambon also does a good job in the short amount of screen time he has. The direction is also superb, with their being some innovative shots and cinematography.The romance between XXXX and Tammy seemed to be a bit forced into the narrative for me, but it does lead to a quite poignant ending when XXXX is shot by Tammy's boyfriend Sidney, as it hammers home the message that there was no way he would be able to leave the drugs business, and that all his efforts were for nothing.Overall this is a fairly average British crime film, but not quite to the standard of previous examples.

Layer Cake is a British crime-drama about a successful cocaine dealer who must do two difficult tasks for his boss before he can retire. Layer Cake showed a lot of harsh realities about being in the crime world and how Daniel Craig's character tries so hard to complete his tasks so he can retire knowing that trying to drop out of the crime world is a really hard thing to do. Layer Cake was an excellent movie and one of the Daniel Craig's best movies before he was Bond. Great directorial debut of Matthew Vaughn, his style has grown in 4 films since his recent film was X-Men First Class. I wonder how I managed to miss this one when it came out. It may just have been an oversight as the market was filled with cockney gangster films back then and I wasn't that impressed with them.

I'm a big fan of Guy Ritchie's British gangster films LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS and, especially, SNATCH, so when I saw this Daniel Craig-starrer was directed by the guy who produced those two films, I thought I'd check it out. Sadly, LAYER CAKE is a dull and derivative piece of work that shows what happens when film-makers churn out familiar, predictable movies in a bid to cash-in on the perceived current popularity of the genre. It happened with Japanese long-haired ghost girl movies, and it happened with British gangster movies. LAYER CAKE contains absolutely nothing we haven't seen before and it's a case of style over substance. Ritchie's films provide a liberal inspiration, as does Tarantino's PULP FICTION, but the difference is that LAYER CAKE has no heart and the style ain't that great, either.Things begin on a bad foot with some truly atrocious comedy from some 'chav'-type gangsters and after a while the story begins for real. Basically, it involves Daniel Craig and his criminal buddies getting involved with stolen drugs and rival gangsters, and it all gets very complicated and not very interesting. This might well have been the reason Craig became Bond, because his acting's great and the best thing in this film, but his character is unlikeable and doesn't get a chance to be developed enough. Elsewhere, the supporting actors seem to be just going through the ropes: Michael Gambon and Kenneth Cranham as older generation gangsters, Colm Meaney as yet ANOTHER shouty-sweary-sweaty guy (basically THE SAME as the character he played in CON AIR), Sienna Miller as a dumb bimbo and others besides.Granted, the film does have a few stand-out moments of genuine goodness; the sniper scene is one of these. There are some other memorable moments, usually the violent bits, a couple involving hot tea and an iron, but these are mere minutes in what seems like a very long film. The 'twist' ending is ripped straight out of CARLITO'S WAY and really was the final insult for this viewer. LAYER CAKE is a dumb, wannabe film and fans of the genre should stick with SNATCH.

Forget - if you will - that Guy Richie had anything to do with this near- cult British gangster film. It is at once intelligent, witty, gloriously filmed and framed, and at the same time infuriatingly complex and annoying.Daniel Craig, in his last film before his Bond days, is very clear about his role in life. He's a businessman, who happens to deal in cocaine. He doesn't consider himself to be a gangster, and as his commentary at the start of the film reminds us: "stay as far away from the end user as possible". He hates guns too, and believes himself to be the gentleman baddie.So does Jimmy Price. Jimmy's empire is built, much like a pyramid scheme, on getting other people to do the dirty work while for all to see, he is a paragon of larger-than-life businessmen done good. He just has one or two little jobs for Daniel to do though, before (unbeknown to Jimmy) our hero plans to retire. Yes this is a "one last job before I retire" sort of film.Firstly, there's the drug-addled daughter of his old school friend, Eddie Temple (played with gloriously latent menace by Michael Gambon). She's gone missing from a rehab clinic, and Craig is called up to find her, at whatever cost.Added to Craig's "to do" list is the little matter of one million ecstacy tablets that have found their way from the clutches of a ruthless Eastern European gang into the possession of "The Duke", a loud-mouth "throwback" accompanied by his motley crew of droogs, not least a very very unpleasant girlfriend who would be kicked out of the Jeremy Kyle Show.Having spent the first 45 minutes establishing who is who, what is what and so on, we settle down to witness a descent into ever decreasing circles of cross, double-cross, and nobody really knowing who to trust; Craig (who is never named in the film) remains calm throughout proceedings while - to quote The Duke - things go "a little bit turbo'.It would spoil the ending too much to say more. Michael Gambon, suffice to say, has been watching events unfold from a far, as has Serbian killer "Dragon" who has a perchant for chopping off people's heads and doing some very very nasty torture using an electric iron.Sienna Miller acts as a tagged-on romantic sub-plot, but as pointless sub- plots go, she's certainly lovely to watch.This film is not easy going. The ending, which I shall not divulge, crackles with the "this is what will happen if you mess with me" from Craig vibe. It is rumoured the Barbara Brockly chose Craig to be the next Bond on the strength of his last words in the film and the rest, as they say, is history.