Older, wiser and harder

In the Long Good Friday (1980), Harold, the upwardly mobile mobster played by Bob Hoskins, hosts an important meeting with his American criminal "investors" on his luxury yacht, moored in London's docklands. All around you see the evidence of a defunct industry, but Harold has a vision of a bright and glittering future.

Perhaps it's no accident, then, that the climax of Layer Cake has its nameless protagonist, played by Daniel Craig, staring across the Thames from the Greenwich Royal Observatory to where the three massive towers of Canary Wharf lift out of the neonsparking haze of the Isle of Dogs. For as it has been to the London skyline, so has it been to the London gangster movie, which in the last quarter century has got bigger, faster, cooler and of course, more violent.

In the mid-Seventies, the demise of the old fashioned blagger vaulting over the jump with a sawn-off, put paid to the romantic vision of violent crime which fuelled scores of Brit Flicks. It was getting to the point where, if you wanted enough shooters in a film, you would have to set it in Purdey's, or give the IRA bit parts.

But then came heroin, cocaine, and the whole stinking morass of the London crime world got filmic once more. Hurrah. So filmic, in fact, that it spawned a sub-genre of middle class boys such as Guy Ritchie doing a bit of mockney slumming wiv the crims.

Personally, I found Ritchie's films to be pretty forgettable exercises in geezer worship, suitable only for teenage boys of all ages, which is why it is a pleasant surprise to discover that their producer, Matthew Vaughn, can do far better when he gets behind the camera himself.

Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's. His directorial outing still features the same mishmash of`crazy japes, black humour and violent amorality, but he seems to understand that at root there's nothing that clever or funny about being a bigtime coke dealer, no matter how watchable it may be.

Daniel Craig is dubbed "XXXX" for the purposes of the credits, and, although the pay-off line of Layer Cake rests on this conceit, the significance of his anonymity is social more than narrative. For Craig's character is the drug dealer as middle-class entrepreneur. The minimalist mews house, the Poggenpˆhl kitchen, the hot hatch - he has all the appurtenances of success, but they just happen to come from kilos of coke, rather than advertising or the media. XXXX is intent on getting out of the biz, he has made his wad and he has observed the rules, but unfortunately his supplier, Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) has a couple of favours to ask. One involves Duke (Jamie Foreman), who has heisted a million Es off the Serbian mafia, and is exactly the kind of loudmouthed, shell-suited plonker XXXX has spent his career avoiding; the other concerns Charlie (Natalie Lunghi), the errant coke-head daughter of Price's old mucker Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon), a cockney lad who has climbed right to the top and now has all the icing.

Layer Cake features all the doublecrosses, grasses and reversals of fortune that come as standard to the genre, but it is lifted by the uniformly excellent cast, the snide intelligence of the script (by JJ Connolly from his own book), and the effortless pace of Vaughn's direction. He never misses a trick, defeating our expectations time and again, to the point where, when sex interest Tammy (Sienna Miller) puts on her lucky pants, we know we're not going to see XXXX take them off.

SHOT by Ben Davis on digital stock, the London of Layer Cake is a shimmery place, now grey, now glittery, now lurid. Through this wonderland moves XXXX, who, to judge by his bedside table piled with Penguin Classics, is a university graduate who has developed a taste for high stakes, real-life poker.

In truth, XXXX is not, strictly speaking, a credible character, any more than his henchmen Morty (George Harris) and Terry (Tamer Hassan) are likeable ones; but given troubling life by Craig, he becomes at once intense and diffident, with a charming arrogance that shades imperceptibly into rank immorality.