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movie review - Layer Cake

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is a gangster movie. Our hero for want of a better word is a low-level player in the London cocaine business, and wants out. He realizes at one point that his boss is working with the authorities, and aside from that it's a life full of terrible people. In his struggles to get away starts cleaning house, eliminating threats and arranging things so he can get away. He takes his eyes off the prize a bit when he steals the girlfriend of one of his peers, and he's nearly killed when some of his associates begin to twig to what he's doing. He's walking a tightrope until the final frames, but there is so much going on in this movie that it's hard to actually track, and there are so many characters that it's hard to care about any of them. There are deliberate choices in this film, such as withholding the main character's name, that feel contrived and unnecessary.

I found this story a bit too slick, too contrived, and too full of too-cool characters. It was distracting and exhausting, and I suspect that with its glamor it's also a country mile from how the real drug business works, which is a lot of low-paid guys hang on in desperation and there's nothing interesting or cool about the psychopaths that run these businesses. Plenty of other films have made this clear.

Also, it's neither here nor there that this was the film that convinced the James Bond people that the star, Daniel Craig, could play Bond for what turned out to be fifteen years. This film had been around for some time before I got around to seeing it, and I think I suspected that it was what it was from the outset.

Not recommended.