October 18, 2002

By Veronica Mixon

Samuel Jackson looks like he's having a hellvua time in Formula 51, the latest British gangster movie by a hot Hong Kong director Ronny Yu. Loud and outrageous and filled with fast-talking British thugs, the movie also features Jackson wearing a kilt and swinging a golf club.

The film opens as Elmo McElroy (Jackson) gets busted for possession of drugs shortly after graduating from college in the early 1970s. Flash to today, where Elmo has worked for a drug dealer called The Lizard (Meat Loaf) and blow up his lab so he can escape to Liverpool to make his own deal. He's created a new drug made from legal chemicals that gives the user a high 51 times better than coke, heroin or reefer.

At the Liverpool airport, Elmo meets avid soccer fan, Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle) who hates Yanks. However, he and Elmo quickly become partners when the deal goes awry because the Lizard is determined to make the cash. He hires an ace hit woman, Dakota (Emily Mortimer) and she happens to be Felix's ex-girlfriend. A new buyer, Iki (Rhys Ifans) surfaces as Elmo and Felix race around the city fighting angry skinheads, thugs and running from the police.

Formula 51 is so outrageous that it out runs even the typical gangster/action genre. Samuel Jackson is entertaining in the kilt and the jokes about what's under the skirt, and Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting) makes a great street thug who lives with his mother. Emily Mortimer is beautiful and lethal and you wish her Femme Nikta character had her own movies. But, the jokes about laxatives are gross and I can't believe what they did to the cop!

Frankly, Formula 51 isn't worth the bucks!