5. XXXX - Layer Cake
Columbia PicturesThis is a man who prides himself on being a cut above your average gangster. Daniel Craig's cocaine dealer in this 2004 gangster film has no real ambition other than to make a decent amount of money and get away clean. Throughout the entire course of the film, we never learn his name because he plays things so close to the chest. Is he a hitman in the strictest sense of the term? At the start of the film, no. A mid-level dealer, he is pretty ready to begin his retirement when his misfortune - and his official time as a hitman - begins. This smart and unambitious man spends the entire runtime of the film getting batted around by people who are embroiled in their own power plays and petty turf wars, which XXXX wants no part of. Despite all this, he ends up being wrapped up by the conspiracies and rising confidently to the top of the heap - almost completely by accident. What makes this character so sympathetic is his inherent desire to steer clear of the sort of greed and pettiness that spells the downfall of larger gangsters. He doesn't want to do hits for the big bosses or gain any sort of power. He is content being a business man, which makes him an extremely sympathetic victim of the London crime strata. In the end of the film, he is brought down not by the trap of the crime world he worked so hard to avoid, but because he stole another man's girlfriend. It is a supremely ironic moment, and one that elicits gasps of shock from an audience that has grown to care about this anonymous drug-runner.