Part of the 2005 USA Film Festival
I love British gangster movies. They’re like a breath of fresh air on a genre that’s beginning to show its age.
If you loved Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; if you loved Snatch; if you loved Gangster No. 1 or Sexy Beast or The Limey; then Layer Cake is your movie.
Sure, there’s just as much formula here as there is with the American/Italian counterparts. There’s all the usual suspects: a dash of thick cockney accents, layers of labyrinthian plot twists, generous helpings of great European trance beats and britpop, and a peppering of hyper-violence, and slathering of cool stylish filmmaking.
It would be pointless to try to explain Layer Cake. A good chunk of loving Brit gangster flicks is perpetually being a bit lost in the whodunit of it all. Suffice it to say that this unnamed bloke (the superb Daniel Craig from Road to Perdition) is a middleman drug dealer. He’s a very smart “businessman who happens to be selling illegal narcotics.”
The soundtrack is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time. And the performances were all top notch: Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller (from TV’s short-lived “Fast Eddy”).
Bu ja-know wa Oi fink? Oi fink ya gonna loik i a la!
(You’ll be speaking cockney in no time!)
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