Metacritic reviews

Bloody 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.

A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.

Outrageously 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.

Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.

Emily Mortimer and Robert Carlyle generate heat as criminal lovers, but most of the cast just engages in embarrassing scenery-gnawing.

It isn't simple bad taste that Formula 51 deals in, but a total vacuum of feeling.

A fourth-rate "Pulp Fiction" with accents you can't understand.

Only 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.

A 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.

An execrable mess that leaves no genre cliché unturned or human body or soul untrammeled.