The Cleaner - Geheimagent auf Abwegen

I had seen the trailer for "Code Name: The Cleaner". It looked like a spy spoof. However, more importantly it starred very hot movie starlets Lucy Liu and Nichollette Sheridan ("Desperate Housewives"). Gathering from the trailers Cedric the Entertainer's character is suffering from some sort of amnesia. He finds out he has a white wife played by Nichollette Sheridan and a mansion. Cedric the Entertainer says, "I must be Lionel Richie." I thought that was hilarious. However, I am old. Audiences today are more familiar with the arrests and eating habits of his daughter Nicole Richie. Thus, this is the inherent miscalculation of "Code Name: The Cleaner". The movie was probably funny to those making the movie, without a tangible audience in mind. Too bad. I really like Cedric the Entertainer—he is funny. But he is so off the mark here. Sexy Nichollette Sheridan is whacked out as the femme fa-tale Diane posing as Jake's (Cedric the Entertainer) wife. The only thing that could have saved the movie is if her lingerie mysteriously slipped off her stunning body. Really, too bad. Lucy Liu looks fabulous and looks killer in the marital arts action sequences. Her fight scene with Sheridan could have been a lot longer. Also, too bad.

There is little redeeming in "Code Name: The Cleaner" other than its stars. For that blame the lameness of Director Les Mayfield and the horrendous writing of Robert Adetuyi and George Gallo. The tell tale symptom of this miserable collapse is that the most entertaining part of the movie are the outtakes at the end. Seems at least the cast and crew were having fun. One can only hope that there is more of Cedric, Sheridan, and Liu in the DVD release. Don't hold your breath.

Friday night my wife and I went to see Code Name: The Cleaner, staring Cedric Kyles (AKA Cedric the Entertainer) and Lucy Liu. It's about Jake, a man who wakes up in a hotel room, next to a dead body, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As events unfold around him, he starts to recollect that he is a secret agent, and puts together that he was working undercover as a janitor on a deadly mission.

This was another fun movie. It had a PG-13 rating but I would say that it was a fairly mild PG-13 (a few shootouts and Nicollette Sheridan in her undies), so I wouldn't worry too much about taking a 13 year old to see it. It's the first movie I've seen with Cedric in the lead role and only the second with him in it at all (Serving Sara was the first). I really liked him. He was absolutely hilarious without going over the top. Of course Lucy Liu is always a sight to behold.

The rating it has received on IMDb was a dismal 3.0 but that was because a significant number (52%) of the votes were a 1. I suspect that the movie or one of it's actors really perturbed some group, so they retaliated with a vote drive. There is no way this movie rated a 1. I personally gave it a 7 and my wife tells me we will own this.

Incidentally, stick around for the first half of the credits. The show some very good outtakes.

Watching this movie, I kept thinking they couldn't afford to have a real script written, and must have run out of money when they were about 2/3 of the way through, and couldn't finish editing it. Not to mention, they probably couldn't afford Martin Lawrence for the lead role, so they filled it with Cedric the Entertainer, who does better in supporting roles. Cedric does have several funny scenes, though.

The plot is completely unintelligible, and undeveloped, but based on the genre you can predict most of the action. It's the ever-popular "hero has something secret the bad guys want, so they can sell it to terrorists for a fortune, but it's missing." Not to mention, the scenes or "shticks" that have been better done elsewhere. For example, every time Cedric tried to be funny with judo moves, I kept thinking that he ripped that off from Martin, who does it much better. There is a brief cat-fight scene that is far inferior to the one in Undercover Brother (which is an excellent movie, and much funnier overall).

I don't know why some people slander this movie. They should get some antidepressants or something - somethings not right with these people anyway.

This movie is well made, has good actors doing a great job, interesting (but somewhat predictable) plot! It has pretty much everything you want from a nice action/comedy movie and I certainly enjoyed the movie a lot.

I almost gave it a seven but I'm a cheap b*stard - and even if it's closer to a seven than six - it falls just short of it... =)

I just made up my mind - why the h*ll not...

Codename: The Cleaner reviewed by Sam Osborn

Welcome to January, generally known as the first of two months that consist mostly of studio duds poured discretely from the back of the release slate and into your multiplexes. Like a late August release, January and February releases generally spell 'trash,' with the best of them offering only a nonsensical relief from the heavy, fading awards season. Thus, we have Codename: The Cleaner.

It's the latest work from director Les Mayfield, a man whose earlier films (Flubber, American Outlaws, The Man) are best described as righteously mediocre. This January gem weighs in on a case of missing identity and FBI espionage with Cedric the Entertainer playing Jake Rodgers, waking up in a hotel bed with a dead FBI agent and a cut above his ear. His memory's been fried, leaving him without a name and only fragments of what looks to be a secrets ops combat mission batting around his brain. Diane—played by Nicollete Sheridan, whose beauty has been stretched and manipulated to the point of mimicking a mask from White Chicks—approaches Jake in the hotel lobby, filling him in on some important details pertaining to their supposed marriage and occupation of a bloated estate mansion. It all turns out to be farce, however, when Jake overhears Diane plotting to send Jake into cardiac arrest over a bit of information surrounding a computer chip. Soon Jake's on the run, doing his best play-pretend imitation of spy work, trying to hunt down the computer chip and unveil his own identity.

Like last year's You, Me, and Dupree, Codename: The Cleaner banks heavily on the likability of its lead, giving him the screen-time equivalent of carte blanche. But where Owen Wilson's sly, sandy-haired innocence can grow tiresome, Cedric's rotund antics are nothing if not charming. He leaps to great and often desperate lengths to mine a chuckle, but sometimes surprises us by shoveling out something truly hilarious. So it's a shame that the material surrounding him offers little more than static. Lucy Liu is superbly misused as Jake's girlfriend, rattling off forced punch-lines and rickety, unfitting "sistah" feistiness to match Ms. Sheridan's miscasting as the young, busty blonde (the joke here, I suppose, is that Ms Sheridan's peaked forty). The plot feels improvised; so weak that is seems to modify itself according to whatever improvisation Cedric throws at the script. It all comes together like a Jackie Chan Hong Kong action picture, only with Cedric the Entertainer doing the karate. It works, but only if you slouch in your seat and let your ears and eyes glaze over in a popcorn haze. It is January, after all.

Sam Osborn