Formula 51
C’mon, Take The Money and Run
British humor — or, more accurately, humour — is well known for being dry, and for being largely inaccessible to American viewers. Therefore, it’s not too terribly surprising that American reviewers of Formula 51 have universally panned it; nobody told them that it was supposed to be a comedy. If you’re under the impression that Formula 51 is supposed to be some kind of gritty action picture, naturally you will see it as a complete waste of time, a totally botched effort. But if you’re aware ahead of time that it’s a spoof, an intermittently clever takeoff of all those gritty action pictures, then the movie gets a good deal better, almost to the point that it’s borderline enjoyable.
So one of the problems is that the filmmakers forgot to tell the reviewers that Formula 51 is a comedy. Unfortunately, they also seem to have forgotten to tell the actors.
Nobody appears to have told Samuel L. Jackson, for example, that this was a comedy, with the possible exception of the costuming department. (Which is odd, because he is the star and the executive producer to boot, and this is the sort of thing you would think to find out before you make a movie.) Jackson is a talented, subtle actor, and here he’s reduced to something like a giant sight gag. For reasons best left alone, Jackson spends the bulk of the movie dressed in a kilt, complete with a black patent-leather sporran. This, in and of itself, is supposed to be hilarious, but it falls far short.
The kilt is such a touchstone for the movie that it’s worth exploring how such a thing could be funny. If the kilt were forced on Jackson for some reason, it might be funny, like the scene in Pulp Fiction where a bloodspattered Jackson and John Travolta must wear what’s in the back of Quentin Tarantino’s closet. But it seems as though it’s a fashion statement for Jackson, all the more so because he’s toting a set of golf clubs. The humor that we get is from a various lot of Brits telling Jackson various comments on the order of “Nice dress”. This is not funny, unless the sight of Samuel L. Jackson whacking a lot of British yobbos with a titanium driver is funny in and of itself, which it doesn’t seem to be.
Jackson is a genius chemist working as a street pharmacologist for an American drug dealer called “The Lizard” (played by Meat Loaf, again for reasons best left alone). Jackson is in Liverpool to try to sell a newly formulated drug, 51 more times powerful than cocaine and heroin put together, and perfectly legal to boot. And selling it in Liverpool, of all places, makes no sense whatsoever until you understand that it is designed primarily to get the film crew out of Southern California and into a more cost-friendly environment.
It has the added bonus of putting Jackson in the beloved Hollywood fish-out-of-water situation, although not much is done with this. Jackson gets to register his disgust with a platter of greasy fish and chips, and lectures others on the superiority of baseball to cricket, but that’s about it as far as comedy goes.
Then there is Robert Carlyle, playing one of the aforementioned British yobbos, a soccer hooligan in a suit coat. The funny part of his character is supposed to be his devotion to Liverpool’s soccer team, about which the movie assumes more than American audiences actually know. (Which is, of course, nothing, although we learn that the Liverpool team anthem is “You’ll Never Walk Alone, again, for reasons best left alone.) But this never really registers with the audience; there are enough rabid sports fans in America that Carlyle’s passion for the Liverpool FC hardly seems extreme or even unusual.
Then there is Carlyle’s romance with the winsome Emily Mortimer, who is playing a sniper in the Lizard’s employ. (It is not altogether clear why, given the current spate of sniper shootings in the Washington, DC area, this film was released and Phone Booth was not.) Her character is the least funny of the lot, and she is relegated to the part of The Girl, again, for reasons that are best left alone.
Only Rhys Ifans seems to realize that this is a comedy, and plays the part of his wild-eyed Liverpudlian drug dealer with brio and panache. “Drugs,” he tells us, “are our mates,” and it’s nice to see someone on screen taking pride in their profession for a change. Ifans is not given nearly enough screen time, and Formula 51 might have been considerably better if he were the movie’s focus instead of the dour Jackson.
Formula 51 is not necessarily a bad movie, just a dumb and derivative one. It is directed with considerable energy by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu (who sports titles on his IMDb bio like Shogun and His Little Kitchen and Chase Ghost Seven Powers). When the movie remembers to be funny, it often is. But it would have worked so much better if it had been crafted as a spoof, if the actors and the producers and the directors were let in on the joke, if the movie’s motivation had been to entertain the audience instead of taking their money and running off with it.