The 51st State

“Nice wheels. Dirty deals. And one mean mother in a kilt.”

Elmo McElroy (Samuel L. Jackson), an American master chemist, flies to Britain with a formula for a powerful new drug and one plan: sell it once, for more money than he will ever see again. He is met by Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), a local fixer in a kilt. Ronny Yu pushes the story through a Liverpool underworld where every deal is a trap, and the idea sits plainly in the plot: a man who trusts his own cleverness has no one watching his back.