Layer Cake Reviews
Top Critic
It's a little bleak, a little twisted, a little gory, and a lot funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film is lamentably short of narrative coherence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It's almost too much to follow, but the style, proven by Ritchie time and again, is irresistible.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
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.
An exercise in high style, high octane and low-key suaveness.
The film's a diverting enough 105 minutes, with a few surprises in store.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A gangster film, despite what its title suggests, that ranks with the best of the genre.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Bloody good fun a great deal of the time. Love the accents. Love the guns. Bang-bang.
| Original Score: B
May be a worthy successor to a busy genre, but it is not an inventive inheritor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
As good as the story and direction may be, much of the film's success is up to Daniel Craig.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
An appropriately hard-boiled quality runs through the movie, and the cast (from top to bottom) brings its best, putting the frosting on this nasty bit of Layer Cake.
| Original Score: B+
Layer Cake has sizzle, but it also offers plenty of steak.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
The special appeal of Layer Cake derives from its efficient, gripping story and from the personality of the unnamed protagonist.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A corrosive confection of style and bile, its gleaming, butter cream-frosted contours not really concealing the crumbs who have curdled British society with their drugs.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
[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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
As choices for a night's entertainment, well, you'd do better with a pint of Bass.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
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.
| Original Score: 3/4
Layer Cake is laced with flashbacks and stylistic tics, but it never loses its forward momentum, and to the last shot, it avoids predictability.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is one of those movies in which you simply pluck out what there is to entertain you and forget about the rest.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
The newest in British gangland entertainment and the tastiest in years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The most crackerjack entertainment I've seen so far this year.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
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.
Pulses with nasty thugs, cold-blooded crime lords, drug traffickers, blond seductresses, and a thumping suspense that can lead to head-cracking violence.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Craig proves that he's got the strength, sophistication and brawny sex appeal to carry 007's license to kill, if only Hollywood would consider the fair-haired hunk.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Smartly put together, with interesting characters and caustic wit.
