By Recommended Re-Viewing is a series in which we make the case for re-watching an old film or TV series which you can stream without leaving your house. It might be a plot that's so bad it's good, a scene which deserves more interrogation or a director's underrated gem.
Here Esquire's senior writer Olivia Ovenden suggests getting your 'No Time To Die' fix from Daniel Craig's excellent film 'Layer Cake'.
Some time in 2004, director Martin Campbell went to the cinema to see Layer Cake, the gritty Matthew Vaughn crime flick in which Daniel Craig plays a cocaine distributor known only as XXXX.
The idea that Layer Cake was Craig's on-screen audition for Casino Royale has become a cinematic fable, but Campbell did actually confirm it, telling the Sunday Express that Craig, "showed such terrific charm in that that it convinced me he should get the part".
Sixteen years later, Craig's final outing as 007 – in Cary Fukunaga's No Time To Die – won't be with us until November, after being delayed due to the global Coronavirus pandemic, but if you're itching for your next fix of organised crime, a brutish antihero, car chases and Craig dishing out sardonic wit, let Layer Cake be your next Bond film.
XXXX is drug dealer who operates with the business acumen of a hedge fund manager. He has decided he wants out of this world but finds himself stuck in the seedy underbelly of organised crime, the film's title a metaphor for its strict social order: “You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like.” It looks like a ladder you can keep climbing, but really there's no way out at the top.
The cast is excellent, with Ben Whishaw (his future MI6 colleague) playing Sidney, the agitated nephew of a drug lord who is the antithesis to his bespectacled Q, and Sienna Miller as his girlfriend Tammy, sashaying and smoking on the dance-floor in silky slow-motion.
There are visual parallels between Layer Cake and Casino Royale: both featuring Craig shellshocked in the shower then downing a tumbler while shirtless. In the scene where XXXX gets hold of a Lüger P08 model Artillery, he clearly imitates Bond by coming around a corner with the gun pointing upwards before holding it out in front of him.
But the symmetry between the films is more than easter egg hints; both are about enigmatic men who are not immune to the trauma that being a gun for hire inflicts upon them. They are wry and cool in the face of danger, but beneath the surface they are human.
This is the sort of humanity which Craig brought to Bond when he joined the franchise. As he told Esquire in 2015, "There have to be consequences. He has to be affected by what happens to him. It's not just that he has to kill the bad guy, there has to be a reason for it."
Layer Cake is the swaggering, swearing version of a Bond film, one more gritty and grim than Craig's turn as 007 went on to be (understandable, with a behemoth franchise at the reigns to keep things in check) but it helped usher in an era with a more human and relatable Bond.
Before seeing the end of that era come November, it's worth going back to the beginning.
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