Matthew Vaughn’s “Layer Cake” is part of the smart set of British crime dramas that have come along in the last several years, from “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (which Vaughn produced) to the more recent “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”. The opening is “Trainspotting”-like in hitting us with a criminal’s counter-indictment of society. As the unnamed criminal explains the drug trade to us, entire shelves full of illegal drugs transform into their more respectable over-the-counter cousins, the potions, pills, and unguents we all take every day.

From there the film takes us into the particulars of the hard-boiled London drug scene, working in a pulpy shorthand that manages to create an underworld both archetypal and modestly innovative. The unnamed criminal is played suavely and sharply by a bony, sinuous, hawk-eyed Daniel Craig. It’s funny, too: Craig’s deadpan delivery is almost Bond-like in places, and the brutal punishment he takes from foes—and far worse, from allies—recalls the longsuffering travails of Jake Gittes in “Chinatown”. A contrived ending dampens an otherwise spellbinding two hours, but Vaughn has added verve and steely command to a genre that has too often, of late, been plagued by big guns, ugly mugs, and loads of cartoonish bluster. He’s a name to remember.