Who Gets to Be the King?

Guy Ritchie has a very specific style of film. He rose up with movies like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch and essentially defined an entire genre around him: the British, street level, crime caper. It was all but guaranteed that once you saw a Ritchie film you could pick out the fact that it was directed by him, with his specific style, tone, and voice all over the resulting film. Like a police lineup, you could look at the assorted films at the resulting movies and go, “yup, it’s that one, Gov. He’s the bloke I saw.”

Layer Cake (sometimes stylized as L4yer Cake) is not a Guy Ritchie film, despite the fact that for years I’ve thought it was one, always assumed it was one, and watched half of the film before looking at the Wikipedia page for the movie and realizing it’s not, in fact, one of his films. It has all of his distinctive flourishes, from a story focusing on street level British criminals, to a washed out film stock and muted tone, to classy tunes playing behind scenes of violence. It is, in every way you could think, a perfect clone of the Guy Ritchie style, failing only in a couple of moments such that you realized, “wait, this guy didn’t make this movie.” It’s a film designed to ape a certain voice because the person directing it doesn’t have any style of their own.

That’s where we get to discuss Matthew Vaughn. The director, over the years, has made a strong name for himself on a variety of movies, from Stardust to Kick-Ass, two X-MenLaunched in 1963 and written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the X-Men featured heroes distinctly different from those featured in the pages of DC Comics. Mutants who didn't ask for their powers (and very often didn't want them), these heroes, who constantly fought against humans who didn't want "muties" around, served as metaphors for oppression and racism. Their powerful stories would form this group into one of the most recognizable superhero teams in comics (and a successful series of movies as well). films and three Kingsman movies. If Vaughn has a definitive style to his body of work it’s his ability to see what other people did and basically duplicate it. His X-Men films are good, but stylistically they don’t feel that different from the X-Men films that came before (outside of their period settings). Stardust is a more generic fantasy version of The Princess Bride, this despite being based on a novel by Neil Gaiman. And as for Layer Cake, well, this feels like a very workman like adaptation of the Ritchie house style. It was Vaughn’s first film as a director and the best I can say is that he really did manage to make a generic-feeling Guy Ritchie film.

Written by J.J. Connolly and directed by Vaugh, Layer Cake follows an unnamed protagonist (credited as XXXX in the film and played by Daniel Craig) as he tries to navigate the world of illegal drug distribution. He has a team of cohorts that help him – hitter Morty (George Harris), chemist Clarkie (Tom Hardy), and mob enforcer Gene (Colm Meany). Together they all work for Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham), selling drugs and giving Price his cut while he oversees the larger operation.

After one meeting, Price assigns our protagonist two things. First, there’s a shipment of product, pills stolen from another gang out of the country, coming in via bagman The Duke (Jamie Foreman), and our guy is supposed to get the drugs for a fair price and find a way to distribute them. Then Price also wants our protagonist to help find a girl, a missing teen associated with one of Price’s associates. These two missions, though, prove to be far outside our guy’s normal skillset. The teen doesn’t want to be found and, arguably, might not even be missing (and she’s certainly protected by more powerful people) while the drugs are so hot that every villain wants them, including the guys they were stolen from. Our guy finds himself in way over his head and he might end up dead before he can work it all out.

From the start Layer Cake is fighting an uphill battle to get us to care about the protagonist. In Movies like Lock, Stock and Snatch, the guys may not be the nicest people ever, being street-level criminals, but they aren’t really “bad guys”. A little low-level grifting by selling counterfeit stuff on the streets (which they’re up front about), a bit of backroom bookie work. Nothing too bad that you have to go, “well, these are really hardened criminals.” But in Layer Cake, our guy is a drug distributor. He’s not just a street level dealer, which would be bad enough, but the guy those guys get their product from. He’s running a multi-million dollar per week racket, selling the kinds of products that absolutely destroy lives, and he’s been doing it for years. You get the vibe he could be king of an entire empire if he were just a little more interested in moving up that ladder.

Protagonists have to be likable and XXXX (or whatever you want to call him) is not. You don’t like his business, you don’t like his personality, and you don’t like him. The only reason you’re even willing to hang around him is because he’s played by charismatic actor Danial Craig. If he were played by anyone else in this movie (except maybe Tom Hardy) XXXX would be a despicable low-life that you wanted to see dead before the first reel was over. Were it not for Craig this movie wouldn’t be watchable at all.

Legitimately Craig’s XXXX is the most likable character in the film, and that’s only because of the actor. No one else in this movie is a good guy at all, so when the trials and tribulations of criminal enterprise come for them (crosses and double-crosses, people trying to murder them, and worse) you don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to you if The Duke has some awful person after him since he’s also an awful person. You don’t necessarily care if any of these guys goes down for a crime, or gets killed, because everyone in this film is a replaceable degenerate just looking to kill someone else off and steal their place. This movie is a churn and everyone in it is scum.

This is really what sets this film apart from Guy Ritchie’s films even as Vaughn desperately works to copy Ritchie’s style. Ritchie understands that to get through a film you have to like the people you’re watching. The guys in his crime films might be criminals, but they’re also likable blokes that you actually want to hang out with. They’re fun, they crack jokes, they get along. XXXX and his crew are professionals that take everything deadly seriously and there’s not a single moment of mirth or merriment among them. You don’t get the vibe that they’re ever good dudes you’d want to hang out with because the film doesn’t invest in them and their lives.

Like, quite literally, this film doesn’t care about the characters one bit. They might have moments where they sit around and chat, but it’s not to develop them as characters; it’s just so the film can dump exposition and fill us in on even more plot. The times we actually do end up liking a character it’s not because of what the story or direction tell us, it’s because the actor they cast is so good their natural charisma bleeds through. The film doesn’t care about actually providing a story you want to watch. You’re there, so it assumes you’ll stick around anyway.

Stylistically the film is fine. It copies Ritchie’s style, yes, and Vaughn clearly tried to take some notes in that regard. It’s not flashy or interesting, not at all, but it gets the basics of the British street-level caper and works it well enough. It’s dark and gritty and it feels of-a-piece with the works coming out at that time. It was enough of a clone of those movies that, as I said, I legitimately thought it was a Ritchie film. Watching it, though, shows all the ways that it fails. It’s not fun, it’s not interesting, and it’s not at all an enjoyable movie. The film did okay upon its release, not quite making twice its production budget of $6.5 Mil, and that seems right. People could tell this was a less interesting version of what other people were making, so they largely stayed away. This is a film that encourages you to stay away from it because it doesn’t want to put in the work. If it would have, it might have actually been good.