Formula 51

If your work fulfills you, and the people around you show themselves to be essentially good, and life at this moment seems to you to be well worth living, you will not enjoy "Formula 51," a loud, brash film that takes as its premise the notion that the smartest bad guy in a given hood universe has the right and the responsibility to humiliate and eventually kill the other hoods, preferably while blowing up everything he can. (Based on the reviews this film received, professional film critics are a content bunch.) However, if you have been feeling stressed, depressed or just plain sick of humanity, and you snap to attention at the idea of watching Samuel L. Jackson walk around in a kilt for all but five minutes of a movie, "Formula 51" will serve as quite the cinematic elixir for your mood. Also there are some really funny laxative jokes.

No one with unwavering faith in the essential nobility of humanity will be able to tolerate the plot, which concerns Elmo McElroy (Jackson), a street pharmacologist and all-around badass. He's created the greatest drug in the world: POS 51, so named because it'll blast you 51 times higher than mundane cocaine, make your hallucinations 51 percent wilder than good old lysergic acid diethylamide… you get the idea. Reluctant to sell it to his employer, the treacherous Lizard (Meat Loaf), Elmo cancels a planned meeting using high explosives and takes off for a seller's market in Liverpool, England, wearing his tartan proudly. We're rooting for Elmo, because the Lizard somehow survived the explosion and sent sniper Dakota Philips (Emily Mortimer) after him, and Elmo's contact in Liverpool is Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), whose primary talents seem to be emitting surging rivers of profanity when silence threatens to descend and repeatedly informing Elmo that America is bad. But there are baddies to be dodged and alliances to be formed in England as well.

Recounting these would be a trial for me and pointless for you, since the point here is not the machinations of the plot but the intersections of juvenile humor, action mayhem, "football" references, reciprocal xenophobia, and Samuel L. Jackson proving that his wallet retains the inscription it bore in "Pulp Fiction." To some extent, director Ronny Yu and writer Stel Pavlou borrow the pre-Madonna Guy Ritchie's aesthetic, with literally unbelievable camera movements, breathless pacing and unrelievedly foul mouths on completely unscrupulous characters.

But Yu concentrates more on humorous acts than Ritchie, and his action scenes are fun and funny, deriving maximum laffs from people falling down or experiencing unplanned-for diarrhea. And Pavlou's original touches enliven "Formula 51"'s conception: a gaggle of frothing-mouthed skinheads played for just the right amount of laughs; a rave-throwing, rant-prone drug dealer whose beloved indulgence is a luxury box at the local soccer stadium; the aforementioned xenophobia (this film was called "The 51st State" in Britain), as expressed in hilarious profanities and trash-talking; and Samuel L. Jackson in a kilt.

Unoriginal touches also deaden that conception, most notably a romantic past between Dakota and Felix that leads to that outcome dreaded by all action cinephiles, a momentum-killing sex scene. But both Mortimer and Carlyle provide some compensating pleasures. Mortimer was last seen in "Lovely and Amazing" as an actress insecure about her appearance; Dakota, by contrast, is quite confident in her appearance, and justifiably so. Mortimer also balances quite nicely the hard edge she must maintain as a professional killer with the tenderness she still feels for Carlyle; she handles the occasional joke with an amusingly imperious impatience. Felix is an implausible object of such a competent woman's love, because Carlyle plays him as having a mental age of about ten. This scotches the romance but pays huge dividends elsewhere, as when Carlyle goes into a Manchester bar to taunt its denizens about the upcoming Manchester United-Liverpool match, holding them at bay with an emergency flare spitting livid sparks. You really believe he's that immature!

But this movie doesn't work at all without Samuel L. Jackson taking in everyone in his orbit with his surging, generous charisma, relishing his position as most sane among his company, asserting that position with wonderfully textured - almost luxuriant - deliveries of profane insults (nobody says the word "motherfucker" better than Jackson), and sporting his kilt like he was built to wear a kilt. He seems to realize the only way this movie works is if he is just as brazen as the script and direction, and inflates his performance accordingly; it's fun just to watch him enjoying Elmo's incredulous insults and violent condescensions and occasional ass-kicking opportunities.

And yet, what he's enjoying doing, and what the movie is enjoying presenting, is undoubtedly crass and pushy and just not the thing for someone looking to celebrate the joys of existence. There are moods in which I would not have enjoyed this film. But I was stressed and tired of the world and myself and looking for as violent a jerk out of my routine as possible, and "Formula 51" had the cure.

I may well go again next weekend.

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