Electric Guitar Shop

There’s a tasty word in a gourmand’s vocabulary to describe when food has that special something – beyond what we know as sweet, sour, bitter and salty.  The general taste of deliciousness that makes you sit back and sigh in delight.  That word -‘umami’- applies to the film Layer Cake – with all the ingredients coming together into 105 minutes of an R-rated drug-crime thriller with clever plot, intriguing characters and titillating direction to keep your eyes feasting.

The eye candy goes beyond Daniel Craig as the unassuming drug dealer, and Sienna Miller as the minor but integral role of Tammy.
The rest of the characters are as fizzy and unpredictable as the ingredients in any one of the million ecstasy pills inexpertly pilfered on behalf of drug baron Jimmy Price by The Duke and his girlfriend Slasher.
At the other end Baron Gangster Front Fender – Vulcan 2000 of the professionalism spectrum is Craig’s unnamed character ‘XXX’ whose fastidious planning and business acumen have been applied to the drug trade until such time as his imminent planned retirement.  His final tasks are set by Jimmy to find the druggie daughter of one of his business associates (the smooth, sir-like Michael Gambon as Eddie Temple), and discover the whereabouts of The Duke and the now missing drug-haul.

Should be easy right? But these storylines are only two of many woven together as Craig’s character finds his plans waylaid by a massive cock-up in an Amsterdam tulip greenhouse, a beat-up after a baked bean breakfast in a London café, a rampant cold-blooded Serbian assassin, backstabbing buddies and the threat of the law. XXX must use his brain to stay alive, get his money, the girl and make some kind of life for himself.  The climax builds into a who-will-live, who crossed whom thriller.

Unraveling this JJ Connolly script – based on his book of the same title – is Matthew Vaughn’s direction, which has similar styling to Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Layer Cake’s decoration though is more like the tailored suits of Saville Row, not the scruffy bloodstained jackets from an army surplus store. In this drug game, you keep your head by having a brain.

Thus, without any Bren gun blasting, all that comparative silence leaves room for the film soundtrack, as the mood of each scene rises and falls in tension, humour, and hyped adrenalin from the ultra-cool sounds of FC Kahuna to Joe Cocker and Duran Duran.

Layer Cake has many levels of entertainment value and is well worth the taste-test away from the usual blockbuster.