Layer Cake (2004)

A man (Daniel Craig) whose name we’ll never learn, let’s call him XXXX like the credits do, works as a new style drug distributor. He abhors guns, isn’t a fan of violence and aims for the professionalism of a modern business man. XXXX isn’t quite as stupid as he sounds, so he does employ ex-soldier Morty (George Harris) as his right hand man. Morty’s good for looking threatening so that things don’t turn violent, though he’d be perfectly capable if push came to shove. XXXX is not planning on staying in the business for very much longer – his retirement nest egg is basically complete. We never learn if the new school business drug lord retires to Spain like his elders would, alas.

Retirement is dangerous in the crime business, of course, and even more so in movies, so it’s not going to come as a surprise to the audience when our protagonist’s life turns rather more exciting and complicated than he likes it. At first, things seem harmless enough. The local mob boss Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) just wants to enable a little business deal between XXXX and one of Price’s old pals, a man going by the moniker of The Duke (Jamie Foreman); also, XXXX is supposed to look for the wayward daughter of another old associate of Jimmy. Both of these things appear easy enough on the outset, but quickly, XXXX finds himself embroiled in layers of intrigue, is hunted by a Serbian assassin, learns some hard truths about the people he trusts as well as his actual position in life and on the food chain. Why, things will get so bad, there’s a good chance the only place he’s going to retire to is an early grave.

Matthew Vaughn’s feature debut Layer Cake is a very fine film situated in the British arm of the post-Tarantino tradition. In its approach to gangsters and its idea of coolness it is certainly also influenced by the early films of Vaughn’s old cohort Guy Ritchie, but lacks the latter guy’s vulgarity. The dialogue – script by J.J. Connolly based on his own novel – is tight, clever, often funny and rather more ambiguous than it at first appears. Which also goes for an intensely layered and constructed plot that manages to be complicated but also tuned like clockwork.

One of Vaughn’s great achievements here is how easy and pop he makes Connolly’s complicated script with a dozen moving parts look, providing a film that by all rights should get bogged down in exposition with an quick and clever flow, and elegant forward momentum.

Apart from being a great, post-modern (at least in the sense that it knows and thinks about all the tropes of its genre and stands in dialogue with them) gangster movie, Layer Cake also works rather wonderfully as a deeply sarcastic critique of the kind of modern businessman XXXX aspires to be, someone who believes doing morally wrong things in a professional way somehow keeps the responsibility for his actions away from him, but whose veneer of civilisation is pure hypocrisy once push comes to shove and he loses his illusions about his own importance and rank on the food chain. At the same time Vaughn never makes the mistake of turning XXXX completely unlikable – for one, there’s Daniel Craig’s patented charisma (bottled by some aftershave company or other, or so I’ve heard) but there’s also the fact this guy is loyal to his friends to a fault, and for all his sins, wouldn’t stab anyone in the back who hasn’t stabbed him before. Which is important, for otherwise, why would the audience care about him?

Three Films Make A Post: Evil Lives Just Beneath the Surface

Mary (2019): Michael Goi’s movie about a haunted ship that ruins a family should by all rights be much better than it is: a ghost on a ship is doubly creepy, seeing as it adds isolation to a vengeful supernatural force; terrible things happening to perfectly likeable people are my kind of horror; and lastly, the film has Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer, and they don’t look bored. Alas, everything that could be wrong with the film is wrong, starting with the needlessly awkward narrative structure of having Mortimer’s character tell the tale to a cop (cue internal groaning about plot twists at once) instead of the film simply telling the damn story, characterisation that does neither know how to do shorthand (don’t even think about actual depth) nor how to properly utilize the abilities of a great cast.
As for the film’s horror business, Goi – despite a perfectly promising background in TV genre work – seems completely incapable to construct even a single creepy scene properly. The framing of scenes is random and uninvolving, and there’s not a moment of the appropriate atmosphere on display.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014): I must have mentioned my immense dislike for Mark Millar’s brand of industrialised cynicism here before; curiously enough, I don’t hate all adaptations of his crap body of comics work quite as much. Case in point is Matthew Vaughn’s (co-written by Vaughn with the great Jane Goldman) super spy movie at hand. The movie’s humour is acerbic and generally aims a bit low for my tastes, but at least it does tend to aim for the lower parts of the people on top. Why, there’s even a bit of thinking about class in here that seems…honest. The film also has a lot of fun with the whole super spy business, putting imaginative twists on all kinds of standard tropes. The action is generally loud and abrasive but well-structured, and for most of the time, the film’s on the right side of being cynical. It also features Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson in great form.

The final act does become decidedly weaker, though, suffering under the really Millar-ian idea that mass murder is inherently hilarious, at the same time it is trying to milk it for laughs, also trying to use it as the base for suspense. Which, no surprise, doesn’t work out terribly well, but doesn’t end up so bad it ruins what is a surprisingly fun time.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017): Aaaaand, I don’t know what happened here. Same director, same writers, basically the same cast, but the film is a bloated mess, lacking the satiric edge of the first film, landing hardly any joke. It was apparently made under the impression that what this sequel really needed were about a dozen sub-plots, none of which is terribly interesting, and so spends more time tediously juggling all the bits and pieces of what feels like at least half a dozen different scripts in place of having an actual narrative.


It doesn’t help at all that the action sequences follow the way of the plot, becoming more and louder but less interesting, certainly going through the motions of how a contemporary big budget movie action sequence is supposed to look and feel, but never making much of an impact.

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Kick Ass 2 (2013): Despite my general loathing for the works of Mark Millar (with some exceptions) I actually thought the first Kick Ass was a pretty successful mixture of sledgehammer satire, American toilet humour, and more actual human warmth than you'd expect given the source material's boring cynicism. Alas, someone must have drugged director Matthew Vaughn before he made the sequel or something, because this one's just a pale imitation of the first one, with at best two or three good moments. The rest of the film feels worn out, as if nobody involved had actually understood what worked in the first film, and now proceeded to copy the most obvious parts of it in the most obvious ways while suffering from a horrible hangover.

On the plus side, Millar-typical self-congratulatory cynicism still doesn't make an appearance; very much in the minus side, it's replaced with a treacly sentimentality that isn't made more interesting by jokes about vomiting.

Witchboard (1986): Just because I never liked his Night of the Demons all that much, i tend to underestimate Kevin (S.) Tenney quite unfairly. In truth, Tenney is probably one of the unsung heroes of 80s/90s horror, a guy who added a degree of subtlety to the expected excesses while also being rather good at the excesses themselves. Witchboard doesn't come down on the side of the excesses much anyway but gives Tenney opportunity to show off his skill on a more suspense than gore-based set-up. He also adds somewhat complex characterization (even of the kind that doesn't always feel the need to explain everything to the last detail) to a mix that wouldn't necessarily need it, earning actual audience interest in what happens to the characters.

There is also some choice silly dialogue, and a bit of 80s horror cheese to enjoy, so really, there's little here that doesn't provide a fun time. Plus, from today's perspective, I can't help but see the film as a main influence on Paranormal Activity, just made with verve.

Witchboard 2 (1993): Seven years later, Tenney's own sequel to the film is still a really fun and interesting effort, though the crazier parts of the original have been toned down a bit in favour of a kind of supernatural murder mystery. Tenney's still pretty good at that whole "suspense" stuff, and his script rather cleverly plays with some of the expectations built by the first film, as well as with the audience's knowledge of noirish mystery tropes. Even better, the characters are still more interesting than usual in this type of 90s horror, the film tends to show rather more complex relationships than typical in this context, and then there's the never stated but quite obviously implied fact that the ouija board's evil interest actually helps the film's heroine Ami Dolenz to become an independent person. Which, really, is all and more than one can expect from a 90s horror sequel.

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In short: X-Men: First Class (2011)

After the insults to my beloved X-Men that were Brett Rattner's third X-Men "film" and whatever that Wolverine abomination was supposed to be, I had a hard time giving anything this particular studio would do with one of my favourite universes in pop culture the benefit of the doubt, and dithered about seeing this prequel pretty long and hard.

So it did come as a bit of a surprise to myself that I loved pretty much everything about First Class (with its particularly bland version of Emma Frost as the major exception, but Bryan Singer's X-Men films had a particularly bland Storm, and were still pretty darn great), even the self-conscious winking in the direction of its predecessors and the comics, and John Dykstra's sometimes surprisingly weak special effects.

What makes me a very happy X-Men fanboy about the film is that Matthew Vaughn and/or the script actually got what - at least Chris Claremont's X-Men - are all about (hint for Brett Rattner: it's not being shit), and kept the many changes he made to the film's characters and relations well inside the emotional and ideological parameters of the comics.

I was particularly delighted by Michael Fassbender's Magneto, who is allowed all the complexity, bad-assery and fragility he had at the height of Claremont's run on the comic. Vaughn plays fair with Magneto's and Xavier's respective positions, too, which adds an actual moral tension below the comic book ones.

Of course, there might be a bit too much blockbuster characterization shorthand as shown in the somewhat broad way the film treats most of the rest of its characters for some viewers, and some of the film's big speeches might sound a bit mechanical to the same people, but I found myself experiencing these elements of the film as tonally appropriately close to the comics I still love and pretty entertainingly old-fashioned in a mainstream cinema world where one-liners rule.

For me, First Class is a movie fun and dumb and clever and playful enough to nearly make up for what Fox did to the Phoenix Saga, the sort of film that made me run, not walk to my Essential X-Men books (who can afford colour reprints or singles?), smiling happily.

 

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