Cleaner

This is a fun, relatively forgettable little flick. I saw a documentary on real life cleaners of this sort, and that is a nasty business.

Samuel L Jackson does a good job, like he normally does. Cleaner is entertaining, and I think it does a pretty decent job sucking you into the story. Eva Mendes walks around looking like some computer animated hottie (that's just how she looks!) and also gets the job done.

OK, let me address the elephant in the living room, here.. How did Renny Harlin go from something easily watchable and entertaining like this, to The Legend of Hercules? I just don't get that. Moving on.

Cleaner won't keep you up at night, it probably won't be your all time favorite, but you are entertained while it lasts. Watching Jackson clean and talk about cleaning is pretty fun.

What ever happened to Hollywood creativity? There was an interesting idea , about the guy who cleans up the crime scenes and discovers the cover-up of some kind. So far so good, and then it all goes downhill It takes all of grand 5 minutes to completely figure out the whole plot. This movie is ridden with the tritest of clichés. Characters couldn't be more boring and predictable. And the tragic part is,in all of this you could see the potential for a great thriller. It looks like the talentless, behind the scenes moneymakers, once again asserted their rights and ruined yet another movie. Will someone finally get rid of this morons and let the filmmakers do their job as they seem fit.

The premise of 'Cleaner' is quite clever; a professional cleaner cleans up a crime scene, only to discover that, in spite of original appearances, the police had not recorded the crime at all. Unfortunately, as he tries to find out who has put him up to this, the film descends into regulation cliché. It's not an awful film, but it is the sort of movie in which, shortly after each character appears, you can reliably predict what their ultimate role in the plot will be; and where none of the various twists comes as a real surprise. Everything is improbably connected; there's a beautiful woman (although surprisingly no sex); it all comes down to a personal showdown at the end. It's watchable; but scarcely interesting.

Cleaner is a surprisingly boring and lackluster movie beautifully photographed. The casting is superb and would seem to be a sure recipe for cinematic success--Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, Eve Mendes and Luis Guzman. The dialog is decent and well acted. The plot is where this movie just completely drops the ball.

The plot begins mildly unbelievably--A crime scene cleaner becomes unwittingly immersed in the cover up of a homicide--and then just snowballs downhill from there into a huge police cover-up (I don't want to "spoil" anything for any potential viewers) with an unbelievable plot twist and then ends in a thoroughly stupid and highly implausible ending.

The upside and downside is this movie is beautifully filmed and with such talent, thought and effort that the cinematography itself keeps you thinking it has to get better and it only gets worse.

I hope Ed Harris got paid a lot of money to do this film! Ed does a great job with the little he has to go with and proves what a great actor he is. Eva Mendes does a poor job playing a recent widow to murdered husband (is she angry/sad/sexy/conspiratorial/or just a gold-digger who married a sugar daddy who just got knocked off?). Luis Guzman does a solid job as usual.

I seem to enjoy the movies where Samuel L. Jackson plays a supporting role or shares the lead rather than being the sole lead e.g. Pulp Fiction, The Negotiator, A Time To Kill, etc... In Cleaner he does a reasonable job with a poor plot until the end where his acting coupled with a bad plot twist left me wondering what I could have done better with the time it took to watch Cleaner.

All in all I wish this cast and DoP would have had a better script. I would recommend that Matt Aldrich stick to acting and give up the script-writing. As I think everything was done well except for the storyline/plot aka the script. I give kudos to Renny Harlin (director) for a job well done.

Actually for once I was disappointed after seeing a Renny Harlin movie because I had high hopes for this one. Usually I've known in advance his movies would be bad but "Cleaner" seemed that it might actually be really good for a change. It's not really bad, but it isn't anything great either.

Samuel L. Jackson and Ed Harris did their job very well in the leading roles and Harlin's direction was also good. Eva Mendes' performance wasn't anything to hooray for though. The movie started off well and I thought to myself: "This might be it. The movie that puts Renny back on the top.", but sadly no. The script is just too basic. You've seen different versions of this script on the screen many many times before. The characters and the world they live in might be totally different, but it's still the same generic plot. One thing that bugged me a bit was the musical score which didn't fit in some places at all.

But as far as Harlin's movies go this is one of his better ones. It just needed that original surprise twist in the end that never came. I can't really recommend you go see this in the cinema, but it's worth a rent.