Although Vaughn spent years as a producer for British director Guy Ritchie, his debut film, Layer Cake, originally developed for Ritchie to direct, is not just a carbon copy of a Ritchie film. It does share a number of similarities to Ritchie's first two films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, including its setting in the British criminal underworld, but Vaughn is more subdued than Ritchie and more interested in probing the psyches of mid-level criminals than in exploiting their foibles for laughs.
His nameless hero (Craig)—referred to in the credits as XXXX—doesn't crack wise or hang around with wacky supporting characters. Instead, XXXX views his position as a drug-trade middleman with a pragmatist's eye, socking his money away in legitimate business ventures and making plans for an early retirement. The film starts with a dazzling sequence as XXXX explains the drug trade and Vaughn pulls out all the visual stops to illustrate how XXXX views his business.
Things after that are a little more mundane, as XXXX gets caught up in a convoluted plot involving a hijacked shipment of ecstasy, the missing daughter of a crime lord, and some Serbian war criminals. All of the twists and turns are nothing more than conventional, and in many ways incidental to what makes the film appealing. Vaughn doesn't ape Ritchie's manic visual style, instead opting for a cool, detached eye that's reminiscent of classic British gangster films.
Craig holds the film together as the calm, calculating XXXX, who reacts internally but noticeably to events around him that spin ever more quickly out of control. There are peripheral characters with names like the Duke and Crazy Larry, but Layer Cake's moments of levity never overwhelm its general seriousness and attempt to get at the mind-set of actual criminals.
The script, written by J.J. Connolly from his own novel, is not as insightful as it wants to be, though, and when the film succeeds, it does so on Vaughn's command of the visuals and Craig's subdued, steely performance. Vaughn has been signed to direct the next X-Men movie and Craig is a rumored candidate to be the new James Bond; both indicate they could do well in those capacities. Layer Cake serves them both well as a calling card, but on its own, it's merely serviceable.