Let's get this out of the way first: English Director Matthew Vaughn must be some sort of a wunderkind. Layer Cake (2004)--or as I shall henceforth remember it, 100 Minutes of Daniel Craig Being a BAMF--was, unbelievably, his directorial debut. What?! But how?! I have no clue, because as far as I saw, his directing was brilliant. It lifted an otherwise not-bad film to something that was pretty much dripping with unadulterated cool.
The opening sequence (click to view it on youtube) was one of the slickest cold opens I've ever seen in that genre, especially with regards to the year it was made. Perfectly shot in almost one fluid motion with a solid choice in music, timing, and narration. It reminded me of one of my favorite movies, added to the fast-moving crime drama genre two years after Cake-- Lucky Number Slevin. In my opinion, Slevin (though entirely unrelated), was a tighter, more perfectly pieced together work of awesome, whereas Vaughn's Cake spiraled out of control and into the grittier realities in an almost palpable way (but, again, I think that was the point).
What I love about Vaughn is his ability to just nail the perfect scene, something he did repeatedly in his second film, Stardust. The fact that he was able to successfully accomplish such a massive shift in genre (from gangster crime drama to an actual fairy tale) between the first two movies he's directed is equally impressive. But focusing on Cake, it's evident from the first scene to the last that Vaughn knows his way around a camera. He knows when to make the camera move and when to keep it stationary. He has a strong, almost tangible artistic direction that makes Cake just great to watch. And that's saying a lot, considering the story itself isn't exactly ringing of clarity or unsurpassed cleverness. But Vaughn and his habit of marrying score and scene perfectly make it tough not to enjoy this brutal romp into the English drug trade.
My one qualm with Vaughn is, in the two movies he's directed (and both of which I've seen), he has great potential to expand the cinematic universe in a controlled way. He's yet to take advantage of that. The enclosed feeling that can occur in a sharp and fast film tends to happen when the outside world seems minimally developed, or when characters are either too stationary or in motion too much for the environment to contribute. This is a tough aspect to explain but something puzzling I've experienced in many films like this; it's what prevents most fast crime dramas from hitting the stratosphere of "epic" (The Departed being a notable exception). I think that's a key difference between American and English movies; the big-budget crime-thriller genre expands the film beyond its core characters and core baddies and the environment, the scene, the rooms and buildings and atmospheres carry the weight of the story. Cake's druglords and hitmen just didn't seem dangerous enough, and focusing a little more on what went into the camera could've pushed it to a new level.
Either way, Vaughn is either naturally fluent in badass or has studied well, because for a first shot at feature film directing, this was fantastic.
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