England,
2004, 107 min
Shown in 2005
CREDITS
- dir
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Matthew Vaughn
- prod
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Matthew Vaughn, Adam Bohling, David Reed
- scr
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J.J. Connolly
- cam
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Ben Davis
- editor
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Jon Harris
- mus
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Ilan Eshkeri, Lisa Gerrard
- cast
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Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, George Harrison, Jamie Foreman, Sienna Miller
- source
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Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Ave, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. FAX: 212-833-7911. EMAIL: tom_bernard@spe.sony.com.
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COMMENTS
Matthew Vaughn and Daniel Craig in person.
OTHER
The producer of such British gangland hits as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels turns director with this blistering look at a drug dealer contemplating retirement, as long as he can survive one final trip through the underworld. Our unnamed narrator/hero (emerging British star Daniel Craig) enjoys a comfortable existence as a middle-class drug pusher, tucking money away for the future while avoiding sampling his products. The hero can’t retire, however, until he’s completed two final jobs: a trip to Amsterdam to patch up a drug deal gone awry between a screw-up called “The Duke” and some extremely irritated Serbian gangsters and a search for the drug-addled daughter of his boss’s friend. Both jobs go from bad to worse once our narrator uncovers a web of grudges and double-crosses that stretches back to the 1970s and to the top of Europe’s crime syndicate. Producer-turned-director Vaughn demonstrates the same flair for foulmouthed British dialogue that marked his work with Guy Ritchie, but boasts an ace that Ritchie never had: actor Craig. Favorably compared by Variety to Jude Law (“only more handsome in a rougher, broken-nosed way”), Craig fires up Layer Cake with an energy and erotic charge all his own.
FACTOID #208
Before the showing of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest at the 40th SFIFF, Bay Area editor Walter Murch (who selected the film to screen in the Indelible Images series), passed out fortune cookies to the crowd with Bresson’s musings on making films.
