The 51st State Reviews

If I recall it correctly, I ended up watching this flick because one of my colleagues had the DVD. Personally, like the most of us, I have a huge weak spot for Samuel L. Jackson. Indeed, the man is some kind of workaholic, making sometimes 5 movies a year, and you’ll never know what you’ll get with him, a blockbuster like ‘The Avengers’ or something more obscure like this movie for example. Honestly, I really had a hard time to judge this flick. Indeed, the whole thing is kind of schizophrenic a little bit. Indeed, it takes place in Liverpool, his main actors are American and Scottish (Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle) and the director is from Hong Kong (Ronny Yu). As a result, you end up with a rather fun movie with some serious identity issues. The plot was rather pedestrian and pretty predictable and, like I said before, the whole thing was pretty uneven, especially concerning the tone. Still, it was not bad and Rhys Ifans gave one of his typical whack performances so I wasn’t bored but it is highly forgettable. To conclude, even though it is nothing really amazing, I thought it was a decent flick and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

Kind of a mixed up movie (then again, half of Samuel Jackson's movies are,...) but there's a lot of anti-American sentiment that most of us Yanks would miss, as well as the British in-jokes. It'll get lumped in as a second cousin to the Lock, Stock and Layer Cake genre.