Grade: F

There have been surrealistically terrible movies to come out of England before–for proof just check out “The Touchables,” a monumentally awful psychedelic monstrosity from 1968. This purported action comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson is wretched enough to be put in the same class. It’s difficult to discern how anyone could have imagined that “Formula 51” (which opened last year in Britain under the title “State No. 51”) might ever have worked. Part Quentin Tarantino, part Guy Ritchie, and part 1960s spy spoof, it’s all bad. “Formula 51” winds up being a recipe for cinematic disaster.

The plot, to use the term loosely, has Jackson playing Elmo McElroy, a pharmacology genius who, after being busted for smoking pot in 1971, has been forced to become a drug-maker for a mobster calling himself (constantly, irritatingly enough) The Lizard (Meat Loaf). But after inventing a new pill, made entirely from legal over-the-counter ingredients, that supposedly puts coke, heroin and ecstasy in the shade, he double-crosses his boss–trying to blow him up, in fact–and is off to England to sell the formula to Liverpool kingpin Leopold Durant (Ricky Tomlinson). What he doesn’t know is that The Lizard has survived and hired one of those never- miss hit-women, Dakota (Emily Mortimer), to annihilate those with whom he’s negotiating. Before long virtually everybody is dead save for Elmo and Durant’s gofer Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), a gangly, hyper hood who (as events later show) turns out to be Dakota’s ex-boyfriend. The two are soon running about trying to avoid getting shot and to set up a deal for the formula with a weird, wacked-out club owner (Rhys Ifans). whose name, unless I’m mistaken, is Icky (at least it sounds like that, and given the surroundings it should certainly be spelled that way). There’s a big, ugly finale at a soccer game. And, oh yes, McElroy wears a kilt throughout (until a completely unnecessary twist at the end)–something that’s never explained, but does allow for a few raunchy moments when people are moved to sneak a peek beneath it.

Perhaps this sort of flashy, empty-headed trash, a coarse melange of chases, machine-gun dialogue, anti-establishment rigamarole and brutal machismo, might have been vaguely tolerable with some snappy patter and lightness of touch, but the dialogue in “Formula 51” is unrelievedly nasty and expletive-filled, and the direction by Ronny Hu (whose only past claim to fame was “Bride of Chucky”) is incredibly heavy-handed. For some reason he chooses to ladle on the grossness, too: one sequence, involving a bunch of thugs struck by a savage case of diarrhea, is probably the ugliest thing you’ll see on screen all year, and The Lizard’s comeuppance is a vile miscalculation. (To see how it should have been done, check out the fate John Cassavetes suffered in Brian De Palma’s “The Fury.”) The cast is wasted. Jackson tries halfheartedly to revive his “Pulp Fiction” persona (with a shot of “Shaft”), but fails, and the ferrety Carlyle proves remarkably unlikable; Mortimer seems utterly at sea. The worst work, though, surely comes from Meat Loaf and Ifans, both of whom chew the scenery in a way that would appear over-the-top even if viewed from ten miles away. As for Tomlinson, the big bit the script provides him with involves a lackey following him around with a doughnut for his sore derriere. When the intended humor in a picture descends to a whoopee cushion, you can be sure the makers are running on empty.

There’s one hapless wannabe mobster in “Formula 51,” a foul-mouthed skinhead, who gets punched, pummeled and otherwise humiliated periodically through the picture, supposedly for laughs (though they never come). Though he’s repulsive, it’s easy to commiserate with him, since any viewer who sits through this abomination will know exactly how he feels.