Matthew Vaughn, the producer of the influential ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ and ‘Snatch’, has, with his debut feature as director, served up a film that is not only exhilarating, thought-provoking and funny in all the right places but is also crafted to the sort of impeccably high standard more associated with egomaniacal auteurs: everything from the locations, through the music, to the camerawork, speaks of someone who is intent on shaking up a hackneyed genre. Indeed, it is almost as if Vaughn is deliberately trying to distance himself from the knockabout humour and florid violence of his mate Guy Ritchie’s films (interestingly, it was Madonna’s man who was originally slated to direct): to be sure the film does feature the sort of leering oaf to whom a sinister soubriquet of the sort beloved by East-End gangsters of days gone by would be the ultimate badge of honour, but this type of character is sharply contrasted with the slick, professional approach of ‘Layer Cake’s’ unnamed anti-hero. Moreover, the film, adapted from J. J. Connolly’s novel of the same name by the author himself, possesses a semi-Shakespearian inclination towards the sort of tragic storytelling that puts its chief protagonist through the moral mixer, offering redemption and damnation in equal measure. When I tell you that what Xxxx, as one of the ‘new breed’ of drug dealers, considers here, is one last lucrative job before seeking respectable retirement, your cinematic radar should immediately detect the approach of a less than felicitous resolution; what it mightn’t sense at that range is the irony and the banality of the film’s denouement in which Vaughn very emphatically suggests that a career’s worth of misdeeds cannot easily be scattered to the wind without some of it blowing back in your face.

The plot revolves around the manipulation of Xxxx by a couple of wizened old crooks who proceed to use his street sense to their own ends in the shakedown following the theft of some dodgy pills. Vaughn and his crew make stirring use of locations to suggest the rarefied atmosphere (The ‘Layer cake’ of the title) in which these villains move. Thus we have scenes played out at Stoke Park Country Club and Canary Wharf but never do our characters share the same space as the public: they are either in private anterooms or atop skyscrapers and in this way the film creates a sort of unreality with the deals and drops seeming to take place in a dimension altogether different to that in which the rest of us move. Even when a minor character is savagely beaten in a Cafe, there is no one around to witness it; this effect serves to heighten the sense that Vaughn is telling a cautionary tale.

The performances in the film are uniformly excellent with Daniel Craig, probably best known to film fans for his work as Ted Hughes in the recent ‘Sylvia’, a standout: his playing of Xxxx is greatly restrained and suggestive and he manages to imbue his character with the wit and charm to command the respect of his partners in crime despite the fact that he is fighting something of an existential battle. The signal use of music is also reflective of the great attention to detail lavished on ‘Layer Cake’ with not a song or note out of place. And I should say also, that for the male audience at which this film is primarily targeted, the sense that you are watching something exceedingly well-made will only be compounded during the time that Jude Law’s girlfriend Sienna Miller is on-screen as Craig’s (somewhat token) love interest.

I can’t remember being so surprised by a film for a long time. I can guarantee that the strength of this clever thriller is such that you won’t find it disappointing - despite having your expectations raised a layer.