(aka THE 51ST STATE)
** (out of ****)
Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Richard Carlyle, Emily Mortimer, Sean Pertwee, and Meat Loaf
Directed by Ronny Yu & written by Stel Pavlou
2001
92 min R
The title “Formula 51” refers to an experimental new narcotic that is a mishmash of existing over-the-counter drugs. Similarly, the movie “Formula 51” is a mishmash of once-clever pulp movie elements in need of a rest. There are eccentric gangsters, dirty cops, a hit woman, torture, corpses in car trunks, double crosses, Mexican stand-offs, Cockney slang, skinheads, MTV-style editing and camera tricks, bad words screamed, and a white guy and a black who initially don’t get along, but are friends by the end. Fine and usually funny films have been made out of these elements. “Formula 51” is not one of them, although if the movie’s trailer is any indication, it could have been. The movie devolves too quickly to people screaming at the tops of their lungs while running from one barely coherent situation to another. Or maybe it doesn’t devolve at all. Maybe “Formula 51” just starts out this way. Anyway, the result is all noise, and it’s dull.
I’ll start by mentioning a lesser character, a London arms dealer, played by Rhys Ifans. He screams, he does yoga, he jumps up and down, he wears women’s undergarments. You may remember Rhys Ifans as the wacky roommate from “Notting Hill.” In both films, he is so obviously intended to be “Eccentric” and “Comic Relief.” For someone to be believably eccentric, we have to believe that there is something he must do, there is some weird behavioral trait that he finds so central to his happiness or existence that he is oblivious to how it sets him apart from humanity. In both “Notting Hill” and “Formula 51,” Ifans fails to convey that; he merely comes across as phony “eccentricities” all thrown together around…nothing. Certainly there are people in this world who adopt eccentricities intentionally. Their favorite hobby is talking about how “weird” they are and how much they “freak normal people out.” They’re tedious phonies. “Formula 51” is kind of like that.
So anywho, we join the usually wonderful Samuel L. Jackson playing a tired version of his impeccably cool Samuel L. Jackson character. He’s a drug-making chemist who has just betrayed his LA crew and set sail for London. He wears a kilt through most of the movie, which should be funnier than it really is, probably because there aren’t many good jokes left to make about black guys having large genitalia. The LA people are headed by Meat Loaf as a guy with a skin condition, yet another “eccentric,” and he sends an assassin (the very talented and very thin Emily Mortimer of “Lovely and Amazing”) to thwart all of Samuel L.’s London dealings. It is in London that Samuel L. meets the white guy he will initially dislike (Robert Carlyle of “Trainspotting,” another wonderful actor, which makes me marvel at how “Formula 51” doesn’t work). Carlyle works for London crooks and he and Samuel L. are chased by cops and gangsters as they search for a new place to sell Formula 51 and blah blah blah you get the idea. Some of it’s funny, most of it’s not.
The movie is such a desperate mess that characters are constantly being introduced and killed within virtually the same breath. At one point Carlyle is actually shot in the hindquarters by his ex-girlfriend the assassin. They reconcile without discussing the gunshot, but that’s okay, because he has stopped limping from it anyway, despite a complete absence of medical attention. “Formula 51” seems to have forgotten about the wound entirely. Some movies are able to make jokes out of this kind of bad-movie silliness—the way “Kill Bill” is one long bad movie joke, for instance—but, alas, we’re not so lucky this time around.
Director Ronny Yu has a certain directorial touch that ten years ago might have passed for “visual flair” but is all-too-common now. I don’t begrudge the movie for being silly, for treating violent death as a laughing matter, but there’s more to the movies than running around screaming from one bloody encounter to another. And for working class British vulgarities spoken with such beautiful horribleness that they’ll bring tears to your eyes, I recommend Ben Kingsley in “Sexy Beast.”
Finished August 17th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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