And thus it’s a bit of a surprise that Argylle kind of holds together with a distinct viewpoint. It’s a surprisingly introspective film. Let’s not get carried away: It is still distinctly a Matthew Vaughn film in all its trademark excesses and eccentricities and kinetic violence, but it’s something else, too. Vaughn is reckoning with his own obsession of increasing labyrinthine spy stories. What do the impulses he spatters onto celluloid say about him as a human? What is it like to live in two worlds, a fantasy creation and a much more dreary reality? For the first time ever, I get the sense that Vaughn wanted to put something of his own soul into a film.

Unfortunately, Vaughn is too impatient to bring this introspection anywhere insightful or moving, except perhaps to lampshade his own amorality and violent fascinations. Mostly, he uses the question “How could a film about someone telling Matthew Vaughn stories still be, in every way, a Matthew Vaughn film?” to construct an elaborate conspiracy narrative, much the same way he used a World War I setting in The King’s Man to design perhaps the stupidest, most goofily British, conspiracy in fiction history (World War I was an elaborate ploy for Scottish independence).

In Argylle, we follow acclaimed airport fiction author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) as she releases a new book in her popular spy series starring Agent Argylle (seen in cutaways as Henry Cavill with a remarkably bad haircut). Conway is introverted and humble, facing some writer’s block on her next book after some feedback from her mother Ruth (Catherine O’Hara). She plans an escape trip to her parents’ house to work on her book away from the usual commotion, but during a train ride, she’s attacked by an assassin and saved by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a secret agent who claims her fiction stories are revealing real spy secrets.

What unfolds is a Romancing the Stone-style story of a fusty homebody forced to endure the genre in which she writes fiction. Unlike Romancing the Stone, which basically forgets the author framing story a half hour into the film, Argylle deeply commits to the bit, packing in some serious twists and heft to the parallels between Conway’s fictional world and real world. It’s an ambitious, winding story in a way that works much better than either of Vaughn’s previous two films.

The film has a movie-ruining, though, and that is its pacing… or, rather, utter lack thereof. I’m not joking when I say this might be the blockbuster film most sabotaged by its runtime that I’ve ever seen. A 95-minute version of this film could have been delightful. At 139 minutes, it’s like trudging through a muddy swamp with snorkeling flippers on. Every beat is stumbled through and interminably gawked at, every theme and conundrum stated out loud in dialogue six times rather than once, or even, you know, left as subtext.

The film’s biggest plot twist seems like it should kick off a propulsive final act; instead it comes in the first half of the runtime and requires a 25-minute narrative restart as we get drowned in exposition and meet a whole new cast of characters. The entire final act hinges upon Conway deciding which of two parties to be loyal to, and it feels like she flip-flops sixteen times, and I just didn’t care by the end.

Luckily, the cast is pretty damn solid, everyone seeming to understand the material and proper tone. Howard makes a personable protagonist, genuinely unassuming and growing and changing during the runtime. The best performance comes from Rockwell, who was born for material like this — deeply funny and charming and self-deprecating, but pulling off the espionage action with punch. Give him more action-comedy starring vehicles, please, Hollywood. The deep bench of supporting actors do well, too, including musician Dua Lipa in her film debut, who is electric in just a few minutes of screentime. Samuel L. Jackson, John Cena, Cavill, O’Hara, and Ariana DeBose are all just fine (though Jackson is surprisingly subdued). Bryan Cranston is a lot of fun as a megalomaniac villain.

The action is a fun evolution of Vaughn’s glossy, Crayola digital effects schema, if you have an appetite for the style: In one terrific sequence, Rockwell through a hallway filled with villains like he’s in a video game. A couple of set pieces near the end of the film evoke the saturated colors, musical fluidity, and artificiality of the exploding heads sequence at the end of Kingsman: The Secret Service. One late sequence is an ice skating-themed fight scene that brings to mind the goofy Rasputin dance battle in The King’s Man, for example.

I suppose Vaughn has worn out his welcome with audiences, his slick violence and freewheeling plotting resulting in nightmarish reviews and box office numbers for Argylle. But I actually think it’s an interesting step for him as a storyteller — still in his wheelhouse and a refinement of his style, but trying on some new ideas with an introspective bent. It’s nowhere near his best, and with its pacing issues I sadly can’t even call it good as much as I want to be the contrarian here, but it’s big and twisty and fun, buoyed by its strong cast and glitzy action sequences in the climax.

Kingsman 2 showed what an unfiltered Vaughn looked like — noisier, weirder, flashier, less polished than ever. But it didn’t — it couldn’t have — prepared us for this. The King’s Man unshackles his weird impulses even more, but filters them through historical fiction of a somewhat austere tone, giving the entire film an absolutely bananas identity crisis. It is Vaughn’s worst film to date, though the sheer quantity of all-in moments and bizarre swings mean that inevitably something will land among the mashed potatoes staining your wall.

There are almost no words for how much of a roller coaster The King’s Man is. It’s nonstop herky-jerk ups and downs and swerves: in tone, quality, coherency, good taste, etc. Unfortunately, it’s much more lows than high. The worst sin is the runtime, the thorn in the side of Vaughn’s movies since at least X-Men: First Class. It’s an agonizing two hours and eleven minutes, broken into about five acts.

Better an epic misfire than a boring slog, I suppose, and the film is not without merits. There is some genuinely good stuff in here. The title performance by Ralph Fiennes is actually brilliant, tying together all of the weird directions the story goes. The movie doesn’t deserve so much. When Vaughn inevitably abruptly kills a main character (a Kingsman series staple), Fiennes actually sells the pathos. I was sad. Fiennes is also suitably badass, though it’s mostly other actors who get the big action set pieces until the climax.

There are two really remarkable set pieces, and they couldn’t be more different. The first comes towards the end of the first act, and it’s one of the goofiest fight scenes I’ve seen since the dildo fight in Everything Everywhere All At Once. This one is nearly that cuckoo and fun, too. Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) engages in ballet fighting with a band of protagonists, and it’s just wacky kinetic bliss. Ifans is whirling and mugging and having a blast, and a smile was plastered on my face.

The other, totally different, action high point: A raid on a mountain farmhouse in the final half hour offers the best nuts-and-bolts spy action sequence in the Kingsman series to date. Unlike the big, silly capstone set pieces of the previous movies, this is something that could actually be in a spy movie of the type that the series is a reaction to.

Then there’s a catastrophically bad pivot to Vaughn’s take on All Quiet on the Western Front, a tonally misshapen depiction of the doomed valor of World War I, complete with a tear-jerking death to underscore the nihilism of war. So you’re going to go from a Rasputin dance-battle to this? Okay, Matthew Vaughn.

Yet the single most outrageous element of the film is the colossally idiotic fictional historical conspiracy that Vaughn weaves. It would be so easy to dismiss as parody, and it is certainly taking the piss at least a little bit, but the way Vaughn leans into it is so unhinged: All of the world’s European early-century historical icons of villainy are in a secret organization called The Flock, conspiring and conniving to achieve the ultimate goal of… Scottish independence? The fuck? I’m not joking, that’s the driving mission of head honcho, The Shepherd (who I will not credit here since their identity is a bit of a mystery).

If I had to guess, Vaughn is playing this just straight enough for American idiots like me not to pick up on his English sense of humor. (And, indeed, there is an elaborate anti-American animus to the film — we learn here that the reason America held off on entering the war was because of a Woodrow Wilson sex scandal cover-up.) But I kept waiting for it to feel more like a lark and less like the fetishization of spy conspiracy malarkey grafted onto a Wikipedia article about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

And all of that builds to a mid-credits sequence so baroquely misguided it becomes a 30 Rock joke. It’s essentially an MCU reveal of a celebrity-cast villain, except the dramatic reveal is that the villain is… Adolf Hitler. Dun dun dun! Wild stuff. Are you telling me World War 1 might have a sequel? Gasp!

As with Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The King’s Man inspires enough perverse curiosity to remain fascinating from time to time, and occasionally even good for a breath of a moment, but more often than not it’s just dragged out hokum. Too little spread across to much runtime, and what’s there is brain-meltingly dumb.

And so I might be biased, but X-Men: First Class is, in my eyes, pretty clearly Matthew Vaughn’s best film to date. It’s very far from perfect, too long by at least 15 minutes with a chop suey screenplay that I could have told you was written by at least four people without looking it up. But it’s got a lot of core strengths that elevate it.

The most important thing X-Men: First Class has going for it is a terrific young cast with phenomenal chemistry. Chief among the ensemble is Michael Fassbender as Erik Lensherr aka Magneto: The film’s arc is his breaking bad to the point that it’s obvious this was at one point during preproduction planned to be a Magneto prequel film. It essentially is a Magneto prequel film. James McAvoy is also fantastic as Charles Xavier aka Professor X. As important as their individual performances, Fassbender and McAvoy are outstanding together: The story thrives on their connection which bubbles with homoerotic chemistry, Vaughn framing their partnership and then rift in tragic-romantic terms, going about as far as Luca does in pushing to the edge of making their mutual attraction text.

Part of the joy of X-Men is the huge roster of interesting mutants that fill out the fringes, here almost universally perfectly cast: Jennifer Lawrence as shape-shifting Mystique, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Zoe Kravitz as Tempest, and Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert, Professor X’s human colleague. That’s some star power: all of these actors could easily be first- or second-billed in a major 2024 release. (Poor Charles Xavier… caught in a love quadrangle with Lawrence, Byrne, and Fassbender.)

The production is a lot of fun: it’s a glossy, Mad Men-inspired, early-’60s concoction of handsome costumes, mahogany colors, and luxurious sets. The ugliest part of the production is the bright yellow uniforms that the early X-Men use, though even those have a vintage charm to them. We get to soak in some fun settings: glamorous night clubs, wooded sanctuaries, angular metallic government facilities, Cuban beaches, and more.

With a prologue in the ‘40s before a time hop to 1962, First Class manages to make its antagonists both Nazis and Soviets, which is a little much. Lensherr’s post-Nazi trauma is the most emotionally potent thread in the film: When he finally and brutally gets his revenge on Sebastian Shaw (an excellent Kevin Bacon), it’s both a moral breaking point for Lensherr and a cathartic act of justice. The Cold War setting, meanwhile, is more broadly metaphoric of the lingering tension between Lensherr and Xavier that rises to a boiling point at the same time the world nearly breaks out into nuclear war.

The worst part of the film is easily the script, which is too long by at least 25% (a problem that has plagued every Vaughn project to varying degrees since). The film reaches a slow simmer in its middle act as all sorts of chess pieces move around to set up a finale that isn’t quite worth it. Some of the lines are real clunkers, with absolutely no theme left unsaid in explicit terms, usually several times.

The visual effects are underwhelming, too. Vaughn can’t quite find the sweet spot of making the artificiality of the creatures exciting. Moments that depend on photorealism (e.g. Beast’s fur reveal) are often disastrously uncanny.

As an origin story, the film is ultimately satisfying in a way that Batman Begins is: franchise touchstones gradually and almost organically develop. But it’s also not dependent on being a reverential prequel to be interesting: X-Men: First Class is a satisfying standalone tale with rich character development that’s more than just member berries. Vaughn keeps it full of personality, fun and flashy while still reigning in his weirdest and most cynical impulses. For better and mostly worse, those impulses would be unleashed in every one of his subsequent films.

X-Men: First Class remains, to me, an excellent comic book movie, and an excellent movie outright. I don’t want to get too carried away: it’s certainly multiple tiers away from the very best, like Spider-Man 2. But it’s better than it needed to be and wholly satisfying in a way a Matthew Vaughn movie hasn’t been for me before or since.

There’s a flip side to this, though; a silver lining. Maybe it’s just the bottom-of-the-barrel expectations from friends and review scores. I was genuinely expecting a catastrophe. Instead, it’s… well, a catastrophe, but a wacky one whose flaws border on fascinating. It takes some swings and has an astringent aftertaste that feels, somehow, more flavorful than the slick original. And I’ll go further: This slightly-baffling and off-putting second chapter, in fact, does a couple things better than the original.

Let’s start with one of those improvements: I really did not like Samuel L. Jackson as a lisping Steve Jobs supervillain in The Secret Service, but I am totally smitten with Julianne Moore’s acerbic turn as a charming drug lord here. She is menacing and funny, and she has a phenomenal lair in her death trap American Graffiti cafe. Moore being a better pseudo-Bond villain than Jackson is unintuitive, but really makes sense once you see it.

The Kingsman series is very proud about being very English, and if there’s a thematic thread you can tie between these first two in the series, it comes from glorifying England and dumping on the US: Vaughn posits in these films that England’s stiff-lip nobility may butt heads with pub-crawling working class, but it still forms a pleasant and stable cultural equilibrium. On the other hand, American hospitality and geniality is a front for the toxic and capitalistic greed ruining this world and changing global mores too fast. The progressive zealots — like a secret villain American — cause more trouble than they’re worth.

Alas, the plotting on this film is kind of wacko, so it doesn’t quite click. (And a few of the images are really wacko. Did we really need a CGI rendering of a gadget implanting inside a vagina?) The film picks up a year after the first movie, with Eggsy (Taron Egerton) now a well-established Kingsman agent and in a serious relationship with the Swedish princess Tilde (Hanna Alstrom). Poppy Adams (Moore) is spreading a super-drug she created in the hopes of creating ultimate demand for an antidote she can charge any amount for.

We’re less than a third into the movie with a plot twist that wipes out a significant portion of the secondary characters, including Eggsy’s co-agent Roxy (Sophie Cookson), with whom he had some chemistry and I had been anticipating a love triangle. Ironically, these abrupt deaths are a crowbar to the shins of the movie’s sense of stakes — though it sounds tense and exciting that anyone can die at any moment in the series, it ultimately achieves the opposite effect. So many side characters have died by the end of this movie that it prevents attachment to any one of them. They drop like flies and get replaced with new characters too quickly. Here, we get an injection into the ensemble from a Kingsmen-parallel American spy agency called Statesmen including Pedro Pascal, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, and Jeff Bridges.

The conflict is driven around the super-drug Poppy is spreading, and the symptoms of it causes are compellingly visual (as opposed to the usual “makes you cough, look pale, and lie down” that we usually see as symptoms of undisclosed sicknesses in movies). This super-drug gives you creepy-ass blue veins, then you get stuck rigid like a statue, then you eventually die.

The film takes a circuitous path to its conclusion, twisting all sorts of ways with brutal pacing. This is the most backbreaking flaw of the entire film: The Secret Service felt generously padded at 129 minutes, but not gratuitously so, because the training story framework allowed it to flow pretty quickly, and both climactic sequences had great payoffs. The Golden Circle, though, is a punishing 141 minutes, as gross a failure of Nate’s Casablanca Test as I can remember watching in months.

Making the runtime bloat even worse is that the story isn’t even that substantial. Most of the memorable stuff comes from unhinged details on the fringes: the human flesh burger that Poppy cooks in her diner lair, Mark Strong singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver as he sacrifices himself to a land mine, Pedro Pascal with a goofy southern accent, Elton John smashing henchmen with his piano while dressed like a peacock, Collin Firth’s single-lens sunglasses, etc.

But in spite of it’s movie-ruining flaws, I like The Golden Circle a bit more than I feared I might based on the reviews. It’s got an unrefined kookiness to it, as if we’re finally getting the loose, weird, unfiltered impulses of Matthew Vaughn. It’s not a good film, but it offers some perverse satisfaction of a blockbuster gone off the rails. It’s the same sensation as when I compulsively poke a bruise or pick a scab. In other words, it’s weird in a way blockbusters like this usually aren’t, and I appreciate that. If Matthew Vaughn had cut out a half hour, hell, I might have even recommend it.

On paper, this film sounds like a slam dunk: Vaughn’s mission is to “Make Spies Fun Again,” James Bond-meets-Marvel, with a rip-roaring pace of set pieces and twists. The cast is charismatic and overqualified. The spy gimmickry and visual effects are slick and cartoony in ways I love: Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids but for college freshmen instead of ten year olds.

Unfortunately, in practice, it’s a little bit hollow for most of the runtime; squarely within Vaughn’s comfort zone and only transcending that for a single unforgettable scene near the finale. It’s light and playful throughout; solidly executed, but thin. Vaughn’s struggles to turn slickness into style, to rein any control of tone from scene to scene, to give the characters any depth or sense of meaningful growth, all continue.

Granted, with good execution, that still puts a pretty high floor on the film as a piece of entertainment, and I do ultimately give Kingsman: The Secret Service a recommendation. It goes no further than disposable fun, but as far as popcorn spectacle goes, this is solid and full of energy.

Unlike Kick-Ass, which was a Mark Millar project that Vaughn adapted for film, and X-Men: First Class, Kingsman: The Secret Service is a Vaughn project from conception, that just so happens to have a concurrent Millar comic. He and Millar allegedly came up with the Kingsman idea in a pub after a few pints and some mutual bemoaning how gritty and serious the Bond series had become post-Casino Royale.

The script has all the hallmarks of Vaughn’s tastes. It’s very British, like Layer Cake, and it has a slightly cynical bent to it. I’d call it pandering to teenage boys, with some hookups and male gaze and nasty jokes, but there’s no question that this is exactly Vaughn’s taste, too, so it’s clear he’s making this movie for his own sensibilities as much as your average 17-year-old. There’s a certain recklessness in the writing, too — Vaughn isn’t afraid to kill characters, lie to the viewer, and pivot stakes on a moment’s notice. It’s also too long by fifteen minutes, which most of his movies have been: This one feels like it has an extra climax tacked on (though I do love the colorful head-exploding fireworks grand finale).

The film follows Eggsy (Taron Egerton) as he discovers his late father’s history as a super-secret agent and then goes into a training program to join the “Kingsman” spy program himself. The supposed heart of the film is Eggsy’s bond with Agent Galahad (Collin Firth), his father’s former partner and friend. But the pair’s chemistry is underwhelming, and the result is a relationship a lot less rich and heartfelt than other key relationships in Vaughn films, e.g. Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, or Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr.

Running alongside Eggsy’s training is a conspiracy plot with megalomaniac supervillain Richmond Valentine, played by a lisping, campy Samuel L. Jackson in a performance I despise. Jackson has enough charisma to overcome the ridiculous decisions he’s making, but the wacky affectations don’t make for a memorable character so much as a distracting one. The choice to subvert our expectations of Jackson as an intimidating force might seem clever in the abstract, but is annoying and lacking substance in practice. By making Jackson a Steve Jobs-knockoff, this story also offers some toothless satire on the dangers of overreliance on devices, but it’s an afterthought.

The film’s one truly great scene comes late in the film and lets Vaughn use his best filmmaking skill: capturing ultra-violence with thrilling visual grace. This one has a subversive undercurrent, too: The worshippers at a crowded southern Baptist church get brainwashed with some of Valentine’s technology, and Galahad needs to fight his way through the zombie-like hordes (a hilarious juxtaposition, as they are nicely-dressed churchgoers) to escape. Blood and bullets and debris fly like a finely choreographed ballet to “Free Bird.” It makes for some tonal whiplash, but it’s the one moment of the film that really upends the film’s sense of safe entertainment with something bravura and ballsy.

Otherwise, though, Kingsman: The Secret Service is solidly entertaining but frothy and disposable fun.

Let’s go in ascending order of goodness: The weakest part of the film is a mini crime story about a son (gently coded as gay, or at least lacking in traditional masculine toughness) trying to find his place in his father’s struggling crime empire. Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is a rich brat with no friends, and can only participate in his father Frank’s (Mark Strong) scheming by pressing his ear up against closed doors.

Many of these scenes are glossier, limper versions of what Vaughn was doing in Layer Cake. Strong is always a badass, but Frank D’Amico is such a forgettable villain that these segments generate no menace or intrigue. Mintz-Plasse, while I will forever cherish him for giving us McLovin, conveys absolutely no pathos or complexity that the conflicted son of a mob boss requires.

The next of these stories is a knockoff Spider-Man origin with some bonus sex comedy DNA cooked in. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) declares himself Kick-Ass after he decides he wants to become a masked vigilante like his favorite superheroes. His early attempts to take down bullies and petty criminals inadvertently interfere with the D’Amico crime syndicate and makes him a target of retribution.

Vaughn contradicts himself multiple times over: The opening proclaims this is the gritty story of what a superhero would look like in real life, with a normal human under mask. And yet Kick-Ass does get a power of sorts when a nerve injury gives him an unusually large pain tolerance. And there’s no grittiness in sight: this is a slick and goofy story, a teen comedy bent into superhero shape, almost but not quite hitting on some metaphorical content on the vicious expectations and trials of entering adulthood.

The sex comedy part of this is the broadest material of the whole film: Dave pines after the beautiful and popular Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca). After a rumor spreads that Dave prefers the company of gentlemen, Katie adopts him as her gay best friend, which finally gives him a lot of alone time with his crush but leaves him with constant blue balls. It’s a story that would have made a decent teen romcom ten or fifteen years earlier, but by 2010 was pretty obviously misguided. Luckily, Vaughn wraps up the farce before it becomes too much of a problem, giving Dave a real girlfriend as stakes for the finale.

The best part of Kick-Ass, the thread that is legitimately great and funny and touching, is the story of Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, a father-daughter duo of ruthless masked heroes played by Nic Cage and Chloe Grace Moretz. The satirical thrust of the story, lampshading the fascism and arbitrary cruelty of vigilante justice, is rich and clever. Cage gives a wonderfully dry and kooky performance of a man so overcome with his demons that it breaks down his ability for anything other than fatherhood and vengeance. It’s a lovingly poisoned Adam West pastiche. Moretz is his perfect counterpart, toggling between sweet innocence and terrifying violence with ease. It’s conveying the same approximate message that Watchmen did with Rorschach decades earlier. But in the age of superhero saturation, the point still feels fresh, especially with the amusing and borderline poignant juxtaposition with the warm bond between father and daughter.

Vaughn can’t quite salvage the project into a coherent whole, but it is certainly a fascinating and memorable misfire. Vaughn’s direction is not without merit — he pulls just the right touches from the Wachowskis and Zack Snyder circa-300 for some frothy, stylized ultra-violence in the climax in particular. (Having it pre-storyboarded in comic form probably helped, too.) As a director, he might not know quite what story he wants to tell, but through three films I can tell why Hollywood keeps giving him money: The end result is a slick, professional final-product that has enough story hooks and energy to be easily marketed to a wide audience. This template doesn’t necessarily make for a good movie, but Kick-Ass has enough charm in the right moments to at least keep me interested for the runtime, which is more than be said for plenty of circa-2010 blockbusters.

The adaptation of a Neil Gaiman novel is the first screenplay credited to Jane Goldman (no relationship to William), who has become a longstanding collaborator of Vaughn’s since. Vaughn has both a director and producer credit, and is the one who secured the option after the rights played hot potato around Hollywood.

The film follows Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) as he chases a fallen star, which has come to life as a young woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes), to try and win the heart of the beautiful Victoria (Sienna Miller). Meanwhile, the witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a family of princes (Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng, and Rupert Everett) are each hunting for Yvaine to secure her star powers for their own purposes.

Along the way they cross paths with a bunch of memorable characters: Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro), whose external brusqueness masks a softness; Ferdy (Ricky Gervais), a trader of stolen goods; and Una (Kate Magowan), whom we suspect from the opening flashback scene is Tristan’s secret mother.

The film has a busy 127 minute runtime, filled with set pieces and a lot of plot to sort through. Gaiman and Goldman make use of a bunch of Chekhov’s guns and a few dei ex machina; but hey, it’s fantasy. The action and twists are well-paced — despite the two-hour plus runtime, it’s exciting throughout. The bones of the story are deliberately unoriginal fantasy material, but the tropes are remixed just enough for it not to feel like a retread of other stories.

What keeps it from greatness is that it’s more concerned with how the scenario looks than what it feels like. This is the opposite of what makes most Gaiman fantasy work — his stories are always deeply in touch with the subconscious, which gives them a dreamlike, deeply-felt tenor. Stardust is almost entirely absent any emotionality: it’s a quick-moving spectacle that forgets most fairy tales are charged with horror and grief.

And it honestly doesn’t even look that good: You can tell from the poster alone that it’s blue-orange graded to all hell with no coherent visual style. The special effects haven’t aged as poorly as some from the era, but it still all looks so gimmicky and glossy. The production design is solid but too busy and unfocused to really appreciate. The camera is hyperactive, as if Vaughn figured more visual chaos was the equivalent more of excitement.

There’s also some peevishness to the screenplay and direction that pops up now and again. Vaughn is trying hard to restrain his juvenile sense of humor and cynicism, but it peeks through with a few eye-rolling jokes about cursed boobies or how men only want one thing. But I will give him credit for using some restraint on the big Robert De Niro revelation that could have been a cheap punchline, but is instead empathetic. (“Tasteful” would be too far, I think.)

In spite of my hesitations, the movie really does hold together. The acting is good enough, with Pfeiffer delivering the lone knockout elevating the film. The plot moves quickly but coherently, and it builds to a really triumphal and satisfying ending that wipes away any bad vibes. I won’t hesitate in showing this to my kids in a couple of years.

Vaughn ultimately proves himself a serviceable blockbuster director in a project with much more taxing demands than low-budget crime comedy like Layer Cake.

The film’s biggest strength is the breakout performance of Craig: He is ludicrously handsome and inviting, bringing some physicality and mystery to the role, perfect for the down-to-business character at the center of a storm. It provides a great template for the version of James Bond that he’d play. I’m not sure there are any direct sources confirming it, but it’s widely understood that Layer Cake served as an audition tape for Casino Royale.

The most direct antecedent to Layer Cake is Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, another English gangster film with slick stylization and a zippy pace, one that Vaughn produced and Guy Ritchie directed in 1998. It’s been years since I’ve seen Lock Stock, but you honestly could have convinced me that this was a Ritchie picture. The style is not as sharp here as in Ritchie’s early films, with more emphasis on its neo-noir-esque plot than with flashy visual and dialogue style. Tarantino and Trainspotting descendants tend to be frothier than Layer Cake is.

This slightly more serious tack hurts Layer Cake: it basically demands we take its characters and story seriously. The narrative is a bit convoluted, pulling beats from heist stories without the fun caper sweep of something like Ocean’s Eleven. Only a few parts of the story really land — for example, I found Craig’s affair with Tammy (Sienna Miller) a compelling conflict that I wish had more than two scenes to it, as it provides the crucial crack in Craig’s business-only attitude.

The plot centers around the theft of a huge cache of ecstasy pills that turn out to be nicked from a very powerful adversary, and Craig’s attempt to recover the contraband. The story pulls in a huge cast of players, with lots of double-crossing and allegiance changes that mostly land with a fizzle.

What works better than the script is the charisma of the cast. Craig, as mentioned, is outstanding, but he’s not the only one: Tom Hardy has a small but memorable part, a slightly deranged Sally Hawkins lights up the screen like a slot machine, and Michael Gambon steals multiple scenes with some operatic line readings.

The film ends with a wacky middle finger to the audience that would have created a much stronger impression had the movie figured out how to get us to care more about the fate of Craig’s nameless protagonist than it does. As it plays, though, the final scene is a real head-scratcher that upends the otherwise breezy tone of the conclusion.

Layer Cake is entertaining enough for the duration, but never quite makes a strong case for its existence. This problem — the big “why” — bothers me more in crime stories than other genres like comedies or interpersonal dramas. This is partially because of personal preference (I’d rather watch two people talk to each other for 90 minutes about not much than an uninteresting criminal botch a job, but I suspect most people are the opposite), but also because a baseline comedy and drama are built around characters, whereas a baseline crime story is built around scenario. I could read Wikipedia articles all day if I wanted to learn about stuff happening. Layer Cake doesn’t have anything to buy into. It’s all scenario, no heart. And so I can’t recommend it even though it’s modest fun for the duration.