Layer Cake: Critic Reviews

The most crackerjack entertainment I've seen so far this year.

The newest in British gangland entertainment and the tastiest in years.

This is one of those movies in which you simply pluck out what there is to entertain you and forget about the rest.

An exercise in high style, high octane and low-key suaveness.

It's a stylish and classic gangster saga about the clashing of rival empires, where the only thing worse than the killer before you is the killer waiting behind him.

A propulsive drug-world movie that dutifully covers similar ground in and around London: guns, chicks, inventive use of the F word, expensive-looking locations, designer stuff, and so on.

What's abundantly clear is how far this kind of moviemaking has come from any knowledge of real criminal life; it's a geek's ineffectual daydream of mayhem.

Layer Cake is laced with flashbacks and stylistic tics, but it never loses its forward momentum, and to the last shot, it avoids predictability.

A gangster film, despite what its title suggests, that ranks with the best of the genre.

Layer Cake has sizzle, but it also offers plenty of steak.

May be a worthy successor to a busy genre, but it is not an inventive inheritor.

Craig is fascinating here as a criminal who is very smart, and finds that is not an advantage because while you might be able to figure out what another smart person is about to do, dumbos like the men he works for are likely to do anything.

[Craig] is a great anti-hero, tough yet vulnerable, conflicted and amused, sincere and scared, without a hint of any of it on his sleeve.

Pulses with nasty thugs, cold-blooded crime lords, drug traffickers, blond seductresses, and a thumping suspense that can lead to head-cracking violence.

In the end, Layer Cake serves up the just desserts.

Bloody good fun a great deal of the time. Love the accents. Love the guns. Bang-bang.

A masterly, intricately plotted crime story.

Vaughn's film falls short of Goodfellas, but thanks to his ability to organize a complex story and bold, color-drenched photography by Ben Davis, Layer Cake is a cocked fist of a movie, impossible to ignore.

It's almost too much to follow, but the style, proven by Ritchie time and again, is irresistible.

The film is lamentably short of narrative coherence.

The intricate thing dodges and feints and twists this way and turns that way until, by the time of the alleged resolution, we've lost our bearings completely.

It's a little bleak, a little twisted, a little gory, and a lot funny.

Smartly put together, with interesting characters and caustic wit.

What sets Layer Cake apart from the usual 'Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in' films is a stunningly suave performance by Craig, a top-drawer supporting cast and a dynamic directing debut by producer Matthew Vaughn.