Layer Cake

Herald rating: * * * *

Guy Ritchie, maker of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, turned down the chance to direct this gangster thriller. So, for the first time, Vaughn, the producer of those two pictures, went behind the camera himself. And it has to be said that he outdoes Ritchie, with a classy, textured, even graceful version of the London underworld thriller that has all the smarts and virtually none of the shovel-in-the-face unsubtlety of the earlier films.

It takes its unprepossessing title from the idea that the underworld operates according to a strict hierarchy: you may be able to kick around the person on the next rung down, but someone, somewhere, will have bigger kicking boots than yours.

Craig plays a high-class cocaine dealer who strolls through life with a swagger so cool and restrained as to be barely perceptible.

The ordered ease of his life is upended when Jimmy (an excellent Cranham), a gang boss from several layers up, asks him to do a couple of favours - offload a million Ecstasy tabs and track down the drug-addicted daughter of Eddie Temple (Gambon in appalling make-up), a man even further up the food chain.

It takes him longer than it should to realise that all is not as it seems. One favour means tangling with a bunch of psychopathic Serbs and the other is full of hidden motives. And, long before the several false endings, the film is full of surprises.

Craig is terrific, his performance seducing us while holding us at arm's length, and he's abetted by excellent turns from the genial Meaney and the gloomy Harris as his sidekicks.

CAST: Daniel Craig, Kenneth Cranham, Colm Meaney, George Harris, Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller
DIRECTOR: Matthew Vaughn
RUNNING TIME: 100 mins
RATING: R16, sex, violence and offensive language
SCREENING: Rialto, Queen St, St Lukes from Thursday