Happy Monday readers! We are finally back from vacation and finished with our other project so we are picking up Movie Crush Mondays where we left off. I had to look up where that was because it was so long ago, but it turns out CT last wrote about the weird and beautiful High-Rise so I am following Sienna Miller to the fast paced action thriller Layer Cake.
Layer Cake is one of my favorite gangster films, mostly because of the characters. The movie is based on the novel by J.J. Connoly and the lead character (played by Daniel Craig) isn't given a name. He's credited as XXXX, but literally no one in the movie uses a name for him. It's a weirdly effective way of forcing the film to be exclusively from one characters point of view. XXXX is a cocaine dealer who wants to retire, but is told by his boss that he must complete two tasks first. Both quickly get out of control and the movie turns in to a struggle to stay alive long enough to retire.
The action scenes in this film are amazing. Matthew Vaughn (Of Snatch and The Kingsmen) has always had a great sense of movement and location in his fight scenes. You never get lost. You never lose track of where characters are unless he wants you to. If he and Edgar Wright got together and taught a master class in how to film a fight scene we would never have to sit through another boring shoot out again. This is the type of thing I fantasize about, by the way. A world where no movie has a confusing or boring action sequence. That's the dream.
I also want to give this movie credit for introducing me to Ben Wishaw. His character is clueless and incompetent but he makes the film for me. CT fell in love with him in Perfume (because she is a straight up weirdo) but we both adore him enough to watch almost anything he does. He steals scenes with so much ease that it's almost indecent. He's surrounded by actors with much more experience than him, but it never seems to matter. The man is a damn treasure.
Happy Watching,
Little C
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