Layer Cake (2004)

It's a piece of cake to bake a layer cake...if the way is hazy.



That's the lesson you learn when you watch this movie made by the same guy who did Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. This guy dreams of being an ultracool British criminal, but apparently film school was easier than drug dealing for a pretentious fuckwit to make a living.

As the refined, elderly gangster guy explains to the new James Bond, "You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake son."

Layer cake indeed. If you use a messy recipe, the cake will come out CRAZY, just like this movie gets if you try to follow every plot line.


James Bond (who technically is the Man With No Name in this film) is a middleman for some drug operation going on in Britain, thinking he's clever enough to escape the business whenever he wants to. Not a chance. He ends up having to kill his boss, getting his head smashed into a fish freezer and dealing with a crazed Serbian assassin who takes heads as trophies. This movie is OK if you have a pen and paper handy to keep track of all the characters and their motives. Even if you don't, don't worry about it, most of them get whacked anyway.


It's not as shitty as Lock Stock or any of the other movies this director has done, mostly because it doesn't rely on goofy camera angles and FREEZE FRAME ON EACH IMPORTANT CHARACTER WITH HIS NAME, SPECIES AND CLASS when they're introduced. And it has Colm Meany, the swearing Irishman, who brings a wee bit o' fockin' class to everything he's in.


In the end, the surviving characters end up enjoying their own slice of the layer cake because they did the cookin' by the book. You know that they love cake. Finally, they're going to have a cake.