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75Bloody 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.
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75It is possible, however improbable, that a "bad" movie can still be highly enjoyable. Formula 51 is such a film.
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70Sure it’s brainless fun, but Formula 51 is a trip well worth taking.
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63A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.
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50A messy fish-out-of-water gangland romp.
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50Anything goes, though director Ronny Yu keeps the idiocy on a fast pace.
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50The film should have been called ''Lock, Stock and Two Wilting Barrels.''
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50Outrageously 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.
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40Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.
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38It's a movie that puts Samuel Jackson in kilts, Robert Carlyle in a red Jaguar, and the audience -- if they have any sense at all -- out in the lobby, looking for another picture.
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38It has graceful layers and folds and a nice swing to it, and Jackson moves superbly in it. Unfortunately, I'm talking about the kilt, not the movie.
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38Passed as slowly as if I'd been sitting naked on an igloo, Formula 51 sank from quirky to jerky to utter turkey.
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30If explosive defecation is your idea of a laff riot, this picture -- and the Headrillaz soundtrack, by extension -- should be perfect fun.
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30Too often, Formula 51 fails to differentiate between gleeful excess and white noise.
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Emily Mortimer and Robert Carlyle generate heat as criminal lovers, but most of the cast just engages in embarrassing scenery-gnawing.
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25A fourth-rate "Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand.
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25Feels like it's been pasted together from 51 other movies -- none of them good.
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25Only 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.
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25Desperately unfunny and unexciting.
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25It isn't simple bad taste that Formula 51 deals in, but a total vacuum of feeling.
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20A waste of the filmmakers' time and ours, and offering further evidence that, outside the art house, much British cinema has its head jammed tightly up its own arse.
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20There's an appalling amount of talent at waste up on the screen, starting with Jackson and Carlyle whose tall/short, silent/motormouth double act never clicks.
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20This tired action comedy is the usual weave of over-the-top violence and cross-cultural shtick.
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11A muddled mess of bad-lad clichés, and Jackson's obvious talents only serve to point out how godawful everyone else seems to be.
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10A 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.
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8As sometimes occurs in unsupervised experiments, the result proves foul-smelling and potentially toxic.
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0An execrable mess that leaves no genre cliché unturned or human body or soul untrammeled.
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0Not a second of it is believable; not a tenth of a second of it is refreshing; not a millionth of a second is worthwhile
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0Stars Samuel L. Jackson in the worst role of his career -- one hopes.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 19
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Mixed: 2 out of 19
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Negative: 2 out of 19
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7
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Josh8A surprise hit for me, with some good funny moments.
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DanaS.8Funny and very clever.