Evidências de um Crime

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.

CLEANER is somewhat of an enigmatic movie: it starts out as though it is going to be a sassy comedy about a retired cop whose job it is to 'clean up' after homicides (a distinctly messy and repulsive job), turns into a rather grisly crime investigation story, adds a dollop of 'ain't life grand', and finishes as an exposé of police corruption. The story line by Matthew Aldrich is further fragmented by being so full of holes that the audience has to toss credibility overboard in order to make it through, and the method of direction by Renny Harlin can't seem to settle on which style to take. It is all kind of a mess and justifies the straight to DVD move. The saving grace of the film is a cast of stalwart actors who can make even a shaky script palatable.

Tom Cutler (Samuel L. Jackson) is a 'retired' cop who makes his living cleaning up the gory remainders of criminal acts of homicide and other grisly crimes. We learn his wife was murdered some years ago, leaving him as a single father of the bright and charming teenager Rose (Keke Palmer). Cutler happens on an assignment to clean a particularly gruesome homicide scene in the home of one Ann Northcut (Eva Mendes in a nicely understated role) and as the convoluted story develops, Cutler realizes that the crime scene represents a culmination of forces that threaten to uncork a long history of police corruption - a history that involves him and his best friend Eddie Lorenzo (Ed Harris) and the tough Detective Jim Vargas (a terrific Luis Guzmán). How the story ties together and ends is too loose to convey and would ruin the minimal drama present.

Each of the actors, even the minor roles played very well by such artists as Jose Pablo Cantillo and Robert Forster, give it the full court press. But the see-through script and the jumbled camera work and direction prevent this from being a significant film. Grady Harp

Tom Cutler is a crime scene cleaner – his company is contracted to remove the blood and gore left behind when the authorities have removed the bodies. A former cop, Tom is also a widower with a teenage daughter to look after. Tom gets a job like any other and cleans the mess from a bloody murder in a rich neighbourhood so that nothing remains for the family to see. He goes back the next day to find the family home but that they have no knowledge of his work or indeed that anything untoward happened. Trying to contact the cop who gave Tom the job turns out to be a dead end and a fake name, meaning that Tom has effectively deleted all evidence of a murder before anyone else knew about it. When the police launch a "missing persons" enquiry into a high-profile man in a police corruption case, Tom quickly finds himself up to his neck in trouble.

The cast attracted me to this and I wondered why, with all these people involved, I hadn't heard of it. Watching it helped me understand why it never came to my attention because it doesn't ever get going before it hurts itself. The concept is good enough as we have a former police officer now cleaning crime scenes used to delete the record of murder. On paper what happens also works well as skeletons come out of the closet and the stakes get higher as Tom nears the truth, however when it comes to delivery on screen, it all falls apart. The opening of the film is brisk enough but when it gets to the point where it has to start doing something (ie specifically when the crime is discovered) the film seems to slip into neutral gear and just coast on as before. As a result we get lots of stuff that don't work and should have been minimised or removed and also lots of stuff that is too average to impress.

What I am talking about is the lack of pace and tension in the film; I know that Tom is an older character and that a good thriller doesn't need shouting or running to engage but this film definitely needs some energy injected into it. It drags its way through the plot to the obvious conclusion (and, detail aside, it is pretty obvious) and it never really made me sit up and take notice. A lot of the problem is with the writing because on one hand we clearly have a film that is put together as a thriller but then on the other hand the writer seems keen to drive the film from the characters. Thus we have scenes of domestic troubles, moments with characters revealing things about themselves and, to be blunt, too much talking. It wouldn't matter if the film did this in a way that engaged me but at the same time it is attracting you with the thriller plot so that all this other stuff feels like a waste of time – they could have worked together but here they don't.

The cast can do nothing with it either, although none of them really help themselves. Considering what better films all those involved have done, it is disappointing to see them struggle or fail in different ways. Jackson appears to have been mis-directed because he is looking for something from within his character instead of just flicking into "thriller mode". Neither the material nor the film rewards this approach and his performance ends up feeling like another distraction. He does work well with Palmer though (who herself is very good) but again this whole side of the film feels like a distraction. Harris is obvious and a bit lazy, while Guzmán plays it the way you expect. Mendes is the biggest let-down for me. I know many don't rate her but I think she is good at what she does but, here, she just struggles with her dialogue and character and is about as poor as I think I've seen her.

Overall then what we have here is a flat film that never really sparks into life in any regard. The thriller core lacks energy and the associated threads of family etc are not allowed to grow and end up just being distractions. You can see the potential but without decided what it wants to be, general uncertainty has prevented anyone working too hard and has produced a surprisingly sluggish and dull affair.

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.

I had very low expectations for this movie. Renny Harlin hasn't made a decent movie in many years so I expected the usual crap, but i was very surprised. It had good plot, very nice acting and was well made. Samuel L. Jackson plays a retired police officer who has a "Cleaning company". He cleans up murder scenes and other scenes of death. One day he does a job in a mansion and gets trapped in a web of deceit.

The Movie unfolds in a low key, unusual for Renny, which usually has lot of noise and action in his movies :) It has lot of blood though(not surprising given the title...) So basically this movie is a good way to spent hour and half. Hopefully Renny boy is out of the slums....