Layer Cake

Matthew Vaughn's Layer Cake opened in 2004 as Vaughn's directorial debut after a successful career as Guy Ritchie's longtime producer (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch). The film consolidated Daniel Craig as a leading man, and was widely cited as the role that helped land Craig the James Bond casting that would define the next two decades of his career. Adapted by J. J. Connolly from his own 2000 novel of the same name.

A nameless London cocaine middleman (Daniel Craig, referred to throughout the film simply as XXXX) is one large score from early retirement. He has built a successful, low-profile career operating between the major British underworld figures and the legitimate-business interests they invest with, and is planning to exit the trade entirely. When two parallel jobs unexpectedly collide (a missing-person trace requested by his West London boss Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) and a major Amsterdam cocaine import requested by an old associate) the carefully maintained distance between his various business partners begins to collapse. Colm Meaney plays Gene, his old-school henchman; Sienna Miller plays Tammy, his romantic complication.

The film operates as a sustained working out of British underworld procedure, what the title's actual phrase refers to, in the slang of the period, is the multi-layered organisation of the London cocaine trade. Vaughn's commitment to an unusually discreet style for British gangster cinema (no shouty Cockney-comic dialogue, restrained editing, careful characterisation) produced a film that has aged unusually well and is now widely cited as a foundational text in the post-Ritchie British gangster-cinema tradition.