I tried. I really did try.

It’s absurd, in a lot of ways, to even give Layer Cake any kind of chance at all. It’s one of these hipster British crime movies.

I don’t remember why I thought it might be all right–there was no empirical evidence to influence that thinking. The direction is CG aided Tarantino–well, Tarantino of the 1990s. I doubt Tarantino is as static as his emulators. He really ought to get a cut of any hipster crime movie.

What’s so crappy about Layer Cake is it pretends it’s something original. It lifts lines and scenes from Scarface–made some twenty years before–and thinks its revolutionary. And these aren’t the popular Scarface scenes, these are the drab procedural scenes–which means “The Streets of San Francisco” probably did them eight years before Scarface.

Now, I love a lot of British cinema. Well, I like a lot of it and I love some of it. A bit of it. But the lack of originality is distressing. Did every British director from 1992 on try to make something so Miramax would pick it up for U.S. distribution?

Layer Cake makes me wish Panavision had never been invented, much less popularized. Vaughn’s a pretentious director, but he’s nowhere near as atrocious as the narration.

Yes, get the author of the hipster novel to write the script of the hipster movie. It works out so well.

I loathe this film.

I loathe myself for giving it twenty minutes.

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CREDITS

Directed by Matthew Vaughn; screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel; director of photography, Ben Davis; edited by Jon Harris; music by Lisa Gerrard and Ilan Eshkeri; production designer, Kave Quinn; produced by Adam Bohling, David Reid and Vaughan; released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Starring Daniel Craig (XXXX), Colm Meaney (Gene), Kenneth Cranham (Jimmy Price), George Harris (Morty), Jamie Foreman (The Duke), Sienna Miller (Tammy), Michael Gambon (Eddie Temple), Marcel Iureş (Slavo), Tom Hardy (Clarkie), Tamer Hassan (Terry), Ben Whishaw (Sidney), Burn Gorman (Gazza), Sally Hawkins (Slasher), Dexter Fletcher (Cody), Steve John Shepherd (Tiptoes), Louis Emerick (Trevor), Stephen Walters (Shanks), Paul Orchard (Lucky), Dragan Mićanović (Dragan), Nick Thomas-Webster (Dragan’s henchman), Nathalie Lunghi (Charlie) and Jason Flemyng (Crazy Larry).