Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
Director
Ronny Yu
Cast
Samuel L. Jackson,
Robert Carlyle,
Emily Mortimer,
Meat Loaf,
Rhys Ifans,
Sean Pertwee
Genre
Thriller,
Action,
Comedy,
Crime
Elmo McElroy is a streetwise American master chemist who heads to England to sell his special new formula - a powerful, blue concoction guaranteed to take you to 'the 51st state.' McElroy's new product delivers a feeling 51 times more powerful than any thrill, any pleasure, any high in history. But his plans for a quick, profitable score go comically awry when he gets stuck in Liverpool with an unlikely escort and his ex-girlfriend and becomes entangled in a bizarre web of double-dealing and double-crosses.
Boston Globe by Ty Burr
Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Ray Conlogue
A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
Outrageously confident and wearing a kilt through the mayhem, Jackson proves once again that he has few equals in bringing off a broad, over-the-top lead.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.
Village Voice
Emily Mortimer and Robert Carlyle generate heat as criminal lovers, but most of the cast just engages in embarrassing scenery-gnawing.
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
Only Emily Mortimer maintains a measure of dignity, playing the slinky assassin named Dakota. Whether her restraint was by her design or the filmmakers', she'll come to appreciate that she all but disappears amid the caterwauling and purging of a story that should have died in Liverpool.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
A fourth-rate "Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand.
San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann
It isn't simple bad taste that Formula 51 deals in, but a total vacuum of feeling.
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
A witless, gruesome barrage of jokey violence and lame trans-Atlantic humor, kept moving by the pointless, derivative kineticism of Mr. Yu's hyperactive cuts and splices.
Los Angeles Times by Manohla Dargis
An execrable mess that leaves no genre cliché unturned or human body or soul untrammeled.
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