Layer Cake is a very good British movie, made with Hollywood in mind, more in early Guy Richie’s style. Now this one uses a lot of John Woo special effects and in this computer era, one has to be Hanecke to still want to spend money for special locations or decors. It is dynamic and has a catchy action, not very logical, but who cares? It is with mob, drugs, killing, action and all of them at a very fast pacing, with a little dash of sex, just for completion. Director Matthew Vaughn, the close friend of Mark Strong and Claudia Schiffer‘s husband, did not forget to “cherchez la femme” so, he made Sienna Miller a sexual bait from the moment of her appearance.
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Miller’s ephemeral character is made to appear too slutty perhaps for normal tastes, perfect for Facebook trash, but attractive, and totally not matched with the “tard” she was with when Daniel Craig met her and got stunned. Also Craig is too styled for the company he’s in, but he played his James Bondish role with gusto. Funny is that the next year, he was invited to replace Pierce Brosnan in the Bond franchise, just as a coincidence. Here, in Layer Cake, he is a fixer, a negotiator, a distributor, a high roller, his character considers himself a businessman. The film is written by the author of the book, J.J. Connolly.
Daniel Craig is in a very good company: Tom Hardy, Jamie Foreman, George Harris, Colm Meaney, Marcel Iureş, Kenneth Cranham, Sienna Miller, Michael Gambon… They don’t appear as you are let to believe.
The usual lack of attention to detail is present here as well, as it was present on Francis Ford Coppola’s try to Dracula in 1992, where the Romanians were actually Hungarians, speaking more in Hungarian than in Romanian. I know that Transylvania, the alleged country of Count Dracula is claimed by Hungarians, but the lack of research is as obvious; Marcel Iureş, the Romanian actor playing a Serbian drug lord, speaks an excellent Oxbridge English (even in Amsterdam) and when he gives orders in Serbian, the attentive viewer discovers it’s actually in Romanian (with an accent of great quality), but who cares, nothing is perfect, and the movie is very entertaining anyway. I have completely enjoyed it.
A mobster king can be replaced like a member of the French Academy, only when he’s dead, so one king replaced another, and life goes on. It wasn’t the first British film where I noticed that the Big Boss is big only because he is more ruthless, not because of his brilliant mind, so, any mistake has consequences.
Layer Cake: a film directed by Matthew Vaughn and written by J.J. Connolly, 2004, 105 minutes, 7.2 imdb rate (very high).
Here above, you have the trailer. I wasn’t aware when I watched the movie that it was produced by the same guys who produced the early Guy Richie’s movies, meaning that what I said at the beginning of this review was just a matter of flair.
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