Layer Cake Details

The directorial debut of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch producer Matthew Vaughn, this is a decent enough British crime thriller, but one that's done few favours by such an off-puttingly nondescript title. Daniel Craig plays a rising young drug dealer whose ambition is to make some quick money and then retire early to enjoy it. His plans — involving a massive shipment of ecstasy — are complicated by drugs lord Kenneth Cranham, who asks him to find the missing wayward daughter of an associate (dodgy businessman Michael Gambon). The performances are good, and Vaughn directs with assuredness and aplomb, but there's an over-familiarity about the subject matter that suggests it's time for Vaughn and his crime-movie contemporaries to seek inspiration elsewhere.

Enjoyable fantasy of criminal life in a bright, neatly-plotted thriller; it is much concerned with the pecking order within the criminal world as various gangs jockey for prime position by attempting to outwit and out shoot one another.