“Life is so (bloody) good, I can taste it in my spit,” Daniel Craig declares at the outset of “Layer Cake,” foreshadowing the indelicate fun to come. No male librarian, he.

In fact, he's a cocaine trafficker — albeit one who avoids violence and is plotting an early retirement. All that will change in Matthew Vaughn's “Layer Cake,” a new-look British gangster movie that drills a tidy borehole through the underworld and offers us a satisfying, mayhem-soaked glimpse inside.

Craig — tweedy and intense opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in “Sylvia” — is oil-slick smooth as a well-heeled narcotics wholesaler whose dreams of slipping away into retirement with a million pounds are put on hiatus when an underworld big shot (Kenneth Cranham) orders him to track down a friend's missing junkie-daughter.

That job is easily enough delegated, but then there's the issue of several thousand tabs of stolen Ecstasy, available at a bargain price to whoever is willing to incur the wrath of the Serbian warlords who want them returned. Other complications drag our man deeper into the muck: Double-crosses and missing persons and a scrumptious nightclub tart (Sienna Miller from “Alfie”) who teases him with first-rate phone foreplay. Sanitary up to this point, his career is suddenly sprouting boils. To rid himself of them, he'll have to do what he's never done: Get his hands dirty.

Vaughn's directorial debut isn't as cranked-up as Guy Ritchie's “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” — both of which Vaughn produced — but it's the same sort of confection: Brutal, sinuous and devilishly addictive. If “Layer Cake” gives any indication, Vaughn was at least partly responsible for the style and thrust of Ritchie's films, particularly the elaborate visual transitions and liberal use of flashback. Likewise, the story line is a bit knotty.

Widely rumored to be the next James Bond, Craig is a revelation, mixing wiry physical charisma with an intriguing intellectual sensitivity. More than anything, he recalls a young Richard Burton, down to the faint sadness (or is it hostility?) around the eyes.

From the looks of him, Craig has hauteur to burn, but the character doesn't come off that way. Like some blaxploitation hero from the ’70s, he's just an underworld joe, looking to cut his losses and start a real life — but not before dispensing some dispassionate, cold-blooded street justice.

He may not be Superfly, but he is super-fly.