Bungled drug-deals, car chases round British inner cities, pop video-esque cinematography sound familiar?

Stel Pavlou wrote 51st State while working in a Threshers off-licence during his college years in Liverpool.

It tells the story of Elmo McElroy (Samuel L. Jackson), a kilt-wearing chemist, whose only mistake was to get caught smoking pot in 1971. Having just graduated, his dream of becoming a pharmacist went up in smoke.

Being a compulsive compound-maker, however, he needed to find an outlet for his creative brilliance, and did so filling prescriptions that are somewhat more under-the-table than over-the-counter.

The movie opens in LA, where a warehouse drug deal between McElroy and Lizard (Meat Loaf) is about to turn sour. Rather than showing up, McElroy has left a batch of explosive blue smarties for the scaly one to find.

He was supposed to be selling Lizard his promised wonder drug, a drug so powerful it delivers a hit 51 times stronger than any other pill or powder the little ravers might have tried the 51st State.

Lizard survives the explosion, however, and dispatches gun-toting Dakota' (Emily Mortimer) to bring him McElroy, in one piece.

The trail leads her to Liverpool her hometown where she discovers her ex-boyfriend Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle) has teamed-up with the kilt wearing chemist.

And so the scene is set for a more-or-less standard British gangster-movie. Cue a bungled drug deal with Ricky Tomlinson (The Royle Family), dead bodies flying, cars chasing and scrawny dealers turning the air blue this time in scouse rather than cockney accents.

Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill), who agrees to buy the drug, is as quirky and comedic as he's been before.

And award winning cinematographer Hang-Sang Poon provides similar slow-down, speed-up action sequences to those that gave "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" its distinctive feel.

The film is entirely unconcerned with discussing whether drugs are a good or bad but it does glory in the exploitation of young people, which does not sit entirely easily in this feel-good genre.

In fact the main thrust of the film's plot seems simply to be to get Samuel L Jackson from LA to Liverpool, where, although Carlyle is given equal billing with him, he towers over both his co-star and the city itself as the major attraction in the film. Seeing him in a kilt is just a bonus.

December 3, 2001 16:30