The first thing to take into account when comparing the way voiceovers are used in both of these films is the style of both films – Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake is a deliberately smooth, cool and stylish film that the director himself said was deliberately a detraction away from the gritty and grimy British gangster films that had previously dominated the British off chute of the genre. By no coincidence that is the exact same grimy British gangster film that Lock, Stock is grouped under. With its over exposed film and its over the top, hilariously ridiculous narrative, Guy Richey achieves in making a very different but at the same time very similar film to Layer Cake.
The narrators in both are also characters in the film. In Layer Cake the nameless main character, played by Daniel Craig, narrates the film, yet the only two instances of narration appear at the end and at the beginning of the film. This achieves an odd effect – it should give Craig’s character an almost omniscient status, but instead it gives him an almost fragile one: as an audience we start to wonder why, throughout the rest of the film, Craig isn't leading us step by step through the narrative. Ultimately this conjures a feeling of unease and vulnerability. However this may just be a inadvertent technique employed by Vaughn as, after all, it would detract a lot of the gradually building tension if his main character was going to reassure the audience of his mind state at every given moment.
In Lock, Stock on the other hand the narrator assumes a far smaller role in the film as the barman of the local pub and only has any interaction with the characters at two points in the entire film, yet somehow he knows their thoughts and feelings intimately. Though it could be said that there is a story in itself in that, I believe that Richey made this so simply to add the quirk of having the narrator a minor character as seen in – the admittedly incomparable – The Big Lebowski. However the fact that the narrator remains a character when he could very easily not be does mean that Richey can use his presence on screen to signify the end of particular plot developments – when the characters are around the omniscient narrator nothing that significant nor debilitating can ever really befall them.
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| Alan Ford as Alan, the narrator of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels |
However the content of both narrations are fairly similar in essence. Both of the narrators, regardless of roles within the film, talk to the audience on the level and seem to normalise both of the businesses explored in the films, namely the drug trade and petty (and extreme) thievery. Craig’s narration in fact makes us almost feel as though we’re involved in the operations. The most noticeable similarity is the style in which characters are introduced. Whereas in films in this genre without any voiceovers at all e.g. Pulp Fiction, characters are established mainly through their actions and dialogue which as a result has to be more or less immediate, in a film like this with voiceovers, the narrator can do all the talking, telling us the backstory and the general demeanour of the characters as we see with, just for two examples, Tom Hardy’s Clarky in Layer Cake and Dexter Fletcher as Soap in Lock, Stock. Yet that is not to say that the characters themselves have to do no work at all – it always helps if we can see an example of the character’s personality as we are being told about them and is this perhaps best exhibited by real life ex-criminal Lenny McLean in his role as Barry The Baptist in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
