Layer Cake

This film doesn’t exactly add anything new to cinema, though it does effectively combine film noir with the lad film, but I think the lad film was always borrowing from film noir, so, well, never mind. Anyway, in this well-executed and entertaining crime drama, Daniel Craig stars as a drug dealer who’s just a little too classy for his own good. Thinking that he needs to make only one more big score before retiring, he forgets that in any movie wherein someone thinks he or she needs to make only one more big score before retiring, that person automatically gets more than he or she bargained for. In Craig’s case, he gets a bunch of dead bodies and some Serbian super-criminals and two or three double crosses and about a million hits of ecstasy and also a really hot chick (Sienna Miller). If that sort of thing appeals to you, or you’ve just always wondered what would happen if Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang and Guy Ritchie had a baby through that new Korean cloning technique, then you’ll definitely enjoy Layer Cake. It’s the perfect summer hybrid of the popcorn movie and the porn/cop movie.