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Few films this year have triggered such low expectations as Layer Cake. The world doesn't urgently need another British gangster flick, especially after the dreadful spate that plagued our cinemas a couple of years ago. True to form, it embraces the genre's favoured clichés. There's plenty of violence and much fancifully stylised dialogue. Several characters are predictably sharp-suited. It features a Great British Actor (in this case Michael Gambon) hamming it up as an old hoodlum. Stale lines like "I'm not a gangster, I'm a businessman" and "We can do this the nice way, or…" are dutifully exhumed.

Yet it's not all bad. The estimable Daniel Craig is the hero, a nameless middleman in cocaine distribution, hoping to retire after one last score. Plans go awry (of course), and a complex plot introduces compromised cops, a Serbian warlord and vistas of east London. Matthew Vaughn, who produced the widely imitated Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (and thus has much to answer for) directs with verve. Yet despite its straining for authenticity, only credulous readers and editors of lads' mags would see this as anything but lurid fantasy.

David Gritten

Matthew Vaughn produced Guy Ritchie's mockney villain adventures of yore, and now he's directed one of his own, taking us on the most unwelcome trip down memory lane imaginable. It's back to the grim late-90s era of movies like Rancid Aluminium and Final Cut: that Uncool Britannia epoch when terrible Brit gangster films got made by the metric tonne. This is another flashy, empty tale of Rada gangsters and Lamda geezers: all lack of style and no substance. Michael Gambon phones in a Mr Big routine and it's got Jamie Foreman playing a (voice rises to shout) RIGHT MUPPET!

Our hero is Daniel Craig, a supercool drug dealer who sashays about like some sort of Armani catwalk model, often treating us to a brooding voiceover about the reality of the drug scene. ("I'm not a gangster. I'm a businessman" etc)

Soon he is out of his depth in a situation for which possible adjectives include lairy, moody and tasty. Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast and Paul McGuigan's Gangster No 1 showed how Brit-noir can still be done. This fatuous, naive and boring film does the opposite.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Layer Cake is a flashy, way-above-average British gangster movie with an excellent performance from Daniel Craig as a middle-management drug dealer. On the point of getting out, he gets in much deeper by becoming involved in the violent machinations of Serbian manufacturers of ecstasy based in Amsterdam, big-time British hoodlums with connections in Canary Wharf, and Merseyside's gangsters. It's the directorial debut of Matthew Vaughn, and much superior to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, which he produced.

Philip French, The Observer

Being the directorial debut of the Lock, Stock producer Matthew Vaughn, one is braced for a diet of drugs, thugs, guns and gangs, which Layer Cake duly delivers, albeit with a little more panache than most British thrillers. Daniel Craig stars as a nameless London dealer who runs into trouble after his boss (Kenneth Cranham) sends him on a supposedly innocent errand to recover a missing person. Adapted from his novel, JJ Connolly's script seems to be going in The Long Good Friday direction when two rival London gangs chasing a drugs shipment run up against a more serious international foe (Serbians here instead of the IRA). Read full review

Anthony Quinn, 1 October 2004

True, the directing debut of Matthew Vaughn – who made his name as producer of Guy Ritchie’s crime capers – is indeed a British gangland thriller. But it carries few traces of the saloon-bar jokiness that was Ritchie’s trademark in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Although slick and often brash, Vaughan’s morality tale, set in the underworld of London drugs trafficking, is a sober, controlled venture that builds up some genuine dramatic tension.

Whether Layer Cake will emulate Ritchie’s commercial success is moot: audiences may miss the flamboyant humour suggested by the connection, and promised in playful theatrical trailers presented by celebrity chef Marco Pierre White. Narrative complexity and a generally dark tone may also prove a deterrent. Nevertheless, harking back to the tough, amoral British crime classics such as The Long Good Friday and Get Carter, Vaughn proves that he is to be taken seriously as a director. This brisk, substantial venture should find long life on the DVD market and warm welcomes at fests, especially with a genre bent.

Adapted by JJ Connolly from his own novel, the film follows a successful and nameless London cocaine dealer, referred to in script and press notes as XXXX. Played by Daniel Craig, XXXX is a cool, stylish customer who considers himself a legit businessman operating outside and above the world of his shady associates – notably, genial but nasty crime lord Jimmy Price (Cranham) and his tough lieutenant Gene (Meaney).

Having made his fortune, XXXX plans to walk away from the drug trade business, but Price entrusts him with a mission: to locate the runaway daughter of powerful criminal Eddie Temple (Gambon). He is also required to attend to a consignment of ecstasy tablets snatched in Holland by a volatile East End crook, the ‘Duke’ (Foreman).

Vaughn bookends the film with his flashiest stylistic flourishes. The film kicks off with XXXX delivering a voice-over lesson on the drugs trade, as he walks past shelves of consumer narcotics carrying mock FCUK brand labels – a sequence owing much to David Fincher’s Fight Club. The film’s climax is a punchily edited police raid on a warehouse.

For most of its length, however, the film is restrained and cleanly executed, with Vaughn losing control only at one moment, giving the harshest outburst of violence – a thrashing delivered by XXXX’s colleague Morty (George Harris) - an incongruously flashy treatment.

A complex plot, crammed with double crosses and sidesteps, is sometimes hard to follow: the search for Temple’s daughter fizzles out quickly, and the film waits too long to fully capitalise on the threat of a Serbian hitman on XXXX’s trail (although this thread pays off in snappy style).

Overall, the film benefits from a downbeat and vivid portrayal of the London underworld that, familiar as the terrain sometimes is, carries a ring of conviction. When Vaughn throws in Ritchie-esque oddballs, and cameos by familiar faces such as Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher, it’s partly to wrong-foot us (Fletcher in particular is introduced with a smart twist). Locations ranging from a high-toned country club to Greenwich Observatory extend the usual gangland geography.

Vaughn may not exactly cast against type - both Foreman and Cranham make the most of familiar seedy roles – but there are several eye-catching cameos, including Sally Hawkins as the Duke’s stridently nervy girlfriend, while Harris makes a strong impression as XXXX’s saturnine but unpredictable associate. The strongest presence, however, is Gambon, concocting a wonderfully malign blend of brutish corruption and patriarchal bluffness (the film’s title comes from a vividly-turned life lesson he offers XXXX at the end).

Much of the film, however, rides on the class, heft and general action muscle that Craig brings to his suave anti-hero. His self-serving motives make him largely unsympathetic, and Craig doesn’t quite convince us of the moral complexity of XXXX, who at times comes across – sometimes touchingly - as a bemused fall guy. There’s a hint that greater depths might be revealed by his budding relationship with Tammy (Miller), a good-time girl with come-hither cheek. That Tammy is never developed as anything more than a trophy in Agent Provocateur lingerie says much about the general maleness of the film, and its ultimate superficiality. Even so, Layer Cake is an ambitious attempt to breathe new life into a British genre widely thought to have burned itself out.

Jonathan Romney