this is what layer cake should have been

Layer Cake is ok but not a patch on this film.

What really makes Face is the underlying theme of social trust. Individual greed will bring about downfall (Jules - twice, Dave and the policeman, even Ray says as much in the pub about his prison history), but its the characters that ultimately look out for each other that win out (or at least as far they can). Ray doesn't abandon Stevie, Connie doesn't abandon Ray. Even the copper suggests the police will always be better than the criminals because they are an institution - they too look out for each other. Crime may occasionally pay, but greed never will.

A top film.

I loved both movies, but nothing in Layercake surprised me, doesn't really make anything in it necessarily bad though. Face ended up being something totally different than what I expected(even mid-film the damn thing changed), was pretty weird, but I loved it.

I guess I just don't see how you can compare the two, or say one should be like the other. If I could pick one thing I didn't like about Layercake, it'd be it's nothing new. One thing I didn't like about Face, overly obvious mix-tape soundtrack, I hate when movies do that. I don't know why I felt I needed to say that, I guess just to point out both movies aren't perfect before this turns into a compare and contrast which it shouldn't.

Layer Cake was an adaptation of a book, and a pretty good one, at that.