FORMULA 51
Directed By Ronny Yu
Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle
Formula 51 may be a first – a movie that’s even more synthetic than one of Guy Ritchie’s testosterone laden comic crime stories. It’s the story of a new designer drug, but it carries all the high of a water bar. As an action/comedy it’s filled with plenty of explosions and bloody gunfire, but the noise has little effect on the audience – Formula 51 is as effective as a placebo.
Samuel L. Jackson, wearing cornrows and a kilt, is Elmo McElroy, a master chemist for a burn-scared drug dealer named the Lizard (an apoplectic Meat Loaf) who escapes his boss and hightails it to Liverpool to sell his formula for a new drug for $20 million dollars. Called POS 51, the drug – a shiny, little blue pill – is supposedly 51 times the potency of any illegal drug known to man. And the best part is, is that it’s made entirely from legal, over-the-counter medicine.
Ever since Quentin Tarantino shocked and wowed audiences with Pulp Fiction, movies have endlessly ripped off his mode of quippy, pop-culture laden humor and breezy, bloody ultra-violence. But, nearly a decade later, can this style of action even be called fun? I wouldn’t exactly call Formula 51 fun. It’s an overly mannered violent quirkfest posing as a coherent narrative. In the opening minutes, an explosion rips apart the Lizard’s lair, and bullets tear apart Elmo’s first meeting with a British dealer. The British dealer, by the way, has an assistant who follows him around with an inflatable donut because the dealer has hemorrhoids. Stop me if you think that’s hysterical.
In Liverpool, Elmo hooks up with a soccer-obsessed “fixer” named Felix (Robert Carlyle) who happens to be the ex of a hitwoman named Dakota (Emily Mortimer) who has been hired by the Lizard to kill everyone around Elmo and bring him back to the Lizard.
Formula 51 is the kind of movie in which it is automatically assumed that hilarity will form anytime someone yells out “bollocks.” It makes Ritchie’s graceless, boys-club attitude-sweepstakes comedies seem all the more sophisticated in their over-stylized music video glee. The comic highlights include skinheads swilling down a diarrhea-inducing cocktail, and a baddie blowing up – literally.
Jackson, with his cool-cat demeanor, has played this type of slick, smarter-than-the-room player far too many times in the past; he’s still good here, but how long ’til it develops into an actor’s tic? Carlyle and Mortimer steal the show by transcending the minimal development of their criminal-lovebird characters. The movie is idiocy, but it has been fast-paced, making the idiocy far more tolerable. Formula 51 has been designed as a daft, cheeky lark but it ends giving the viewer a bad buzz. C (Screen Gems; rated R for strong violence, language, drug content and some sexuality; 92 min)
