Producer Matthew Vaughn makes his directorial debut with the Brit underground gangster flick Layer Cake, and he does it with a sexy, cool savoir-faire that runs slick and smooth. It's softer than Jonathan Glazer's fabulously decadent Sexy Beast (most of that due, no doubt, to there being no baddie the equivalent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Vaughn's film) and more coherent than Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1, but it slips snug into the same conversation. Now that Guy Ritchie's been gobbled whole by his very own vagina dentate, it stands to reason that Vaughn, Ritchie's producer on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, would seek to fill the void left in the only U.K. pop genre with any sort of international currency all by his own self. Yet the product of Vaughn's hand isn't so much an imitation as it is a refinement: not better necessarily, but calmer--closer to the lounge lizard James Bond of the 1960s than to the feisty punk Michael Caine heisters from roughly the same period, though Layer Cake is infused, of course, with a healthy dose of nastiness and post-modern irony.

When a stolen shipment of one million ecstasy tablets falls into the lap of our unnamed protagonist (listed in the credits as XXXX), the proverbial middle-man receives instructions from on high to unload them to the highest bidder. The title of the film refers to the multiple strata of criminals in the underworld that XXXX (Daniel Craig, fabulous) has to traverse to finally get to the point where he can grab the organized-crime brass ring of retirement to some private island. Things get strange, though, when XXXX is tabbed to track down the wayward daughter of godfather Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon, delicious); a Serbian hitman nicknamed "The Dragon" and saddled with a penchant for collecting heads turns up on the scene; and sexpot of the moment Sienna Miller surfaces in a hot little number to act the accidental femme fatale.

Rat-a-tat (ring-a-ding-ding?) and every bit the film that Ocean's Eleven should have been, Layer Cake takes on the raffish personality of Craig's professional cad, gliding through its convoluted plot with the grace of a brass-knuckled ballerina. The violence has weight, the consequences are appropriately dire, the twists are twisty, and the tap-dancing is as professional and diverting as it is airless and forgettable. Not a bad thing, however, to be taken on this particular ride: if it's one that you've been on a dozen times before, after all, at least you liked it every time.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

2.37:1 DVD capture: Layer Cake

Sony presents Layer Cake on DVD in a choice but ineffably British 2.37:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer.* This isn't a PAL conversion, but the image is somewhat soft and prematurely aged; good news is that this enhances the film's old school, Long Good Friday allure, and artifacts like edge haloes are kept on a pretty tight leash. I was somewhat disappointed with the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio at first, mainly because one of the earliest songs in the picture, The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary," sounds a lot more muted than it should. Thereafter, however, music and effects deliver the desired punch, with "Gimme Shelter," in particular, assaulting the viewer from all six channels, just as it ought to. On another track, director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter J.J. Connolly--whose voices come discretely from the left and right speakers, respectively--discuss the film's genesis, and Vaughn has a few first-time director moments wherein he cringes at the coverage. Unfortunately, deciphering Connolly is not unlike trying to understand what a washing machine is saying, while Vaughn is sort of a mousy talker, his voice spiking in volume only when multiple consonants are involved. I quickly found myself disengaged by this yakker--though it's not until their optional commentary over sixteen supplemental deleted scenes (totalling 22 minutes) that they actively bore the shit out of the listener.

The highlight of these elisions is the hilariously ill-advised, studio-enforced alternate/happy ending, which suggests that the Hays Code was perhaps preferable to whatever self-prescribed censorship is in place now because at least it imposed morality on filmmakers instead of demanding the protagonist's gratification at all costs. Also on board are two featurettes: in Special Treats Productions' "Layer Cake: Question & Answer - National Film Theatre, London" (28 mins.), mumbling Vaughn and sexy Craig answer a series of predictably dry questions, while "The Making of Layer Cake" (6 mins.) finds the cast and crew going through the EPK motions in that contractually-obliged way. Revelations gleaned between the two: Sienna Miller is unrecognizable without her makeup; Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch both started out with serious screenplays in the vein of Layer Cake's; you don't have to be terribly well-versed in a given film's traditions to moderate its post-screening Q&A; reminding an audience that you were in Tomb Raider is a cheap laugh; and the "fc" in fcuk stands for "French connection," cannily transforming that fantasy involving the company's line of post-Prohibition pharmaceuticals into a movie reference. PIP storyboard comparisons for two sequences (it'd be spoilerish to cite them by name), "poster explorations" (i.e. a still-frame gallery of Layer Cake's various one sheets from around the globe), and previews for "Dave Chappelle: For What It's Worth", Kung Fu Hustle, and Snatch round out the disc. Kung Fu Hustle's speechless trailer also cues up before the main menu.-Bill Chambers

*Also available in fullscreen.

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