Willa's Flic Pic: Layer Cake * * *

Layer Cake
2004, Matthew Vaughn
Drama
* * * 1/2

Morty: Why did you keep the gun?
Gene: I know it sounds silly now, but it was my favorite.
Morty: You better not let the other guns know you have a favorite.

I’ve always found it interesting when movies get you to cheer for someone who is considered a bad guy. Typically everyone in the story is bad but to varying degrees, so the protagonist, although a criminal, is really a nice guy, trying to get out of the business or so down on his luck he can’t afford to quit. The “hero” in Layer Cake is a drug dealer - someone who in civil society is considered a despicable person. But I found myself whining, “Why is everybody picking on him? I wish they’d quit beating him up.”


He also has a very practical business view on being a drug dealer. That’s where the money is. One day, everyone will figure this out and make drugs legal and then they will get all the money. So until then, he’s just going where the market is.

Probably due to boredom more than ethics, he decides to retire early. Unfortunately for him, he’s in the middle of the layer cake – the hierarchy of drug dealing. The guys on top aren’t ready for him to quit. Leaving the layer cake turns out to be extremely difficult.


The big guys on the layer above have a job they want our hero to do. He doesn’t like it but he doesn’t have a choice. Wouldn’t you know it, the deal goes terribly wrong. Who couldn’t see that coming? But since we like our nice guy hero so much, we can’t wait to see how he’s going to get out of this mess.


What makes this different from all the other drug dealer movies, which are purely about action, is that it’s told like a methodology of the drug running business. It’s like an employee handbook for bad guys. It discusses the roles, their hierarchy and responsibilities. This is entertaining because the how-tos and who’s who are disclosed through all the things you should never do. Lines like “If you have to kill a person, never ever tell a living soul” aren’t delivered like cheesy quips but like they appear on page 91 in How to Handle a Problem Employee, which carries its own air of humor.


Eddie Temple: England. Typical. Even drug dealers don't work weekends.

We watched some of the movie with subtitles on because this British film has an international cast (Romanian, British, West Indies, Ireland, Scotland) and some of the dialects were difficult for us to understand. The cast is superlative. The movie is rated R for all the obvious reasons: language, violence and sex.