Nom de code: The Cleaner

I have no idea why I rented this film. It must have been the name Lucy Liu. This type of comedy is not something I like, though it probably will appeal to some.

The Cleaner from 2007 stars Cedric Kyles, Lucy Liu, and Nicolette Sheridan. Jake (Kyles) wakes up in a hotel with a dead body next to him. He has no memory of who he is or what he's doing in the hotel.

Then he meets a beautiful blond, Diane (Sheridan) who claims to be his wife. When he goes to a restaurant, the waitress (Liu) pours a pitcher of cold water on him -- he doesn't remember having any relationship with her, but she's plenty angry.

Slowly he starts to realize that he was a secret agent undercover as a janitor, and that his enemies want something he has.

To be honest, the outtakes shown at the end were funnier.

Cedric the Entertainer, as he is called, is funny with a nice presence, but this movie was just a lot of slapstick and shootouts. Lucy Liu was sexy and tough in her role -- it turns out she's an agent.

There just wasn't much to it as far as humor. Mark Dacascos is so handsome, it was almost worth watching it for him.

I don't have too much to say -- if it weren't for the fact that Nicolette Sheridan prances around in her skimpy underwear, a five year old might enjoy this movie.

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

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).

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.

Ever since Cedric the Entertainer burst onto the scene with his critically acclaimed, scene-stealing performance in the original "Barbershop," no filmmaker has quite figured out how best to harness the considerable talents of this longtime standup comic. In the years since that film was released, C the E has appeared in one monumental turkey after another, with his latest endeavor, "Code Name: The Cleaner," marking what we can only hope will be a professional low point before he begins his gradual ascent back towards some degree of cinematic respectability.

In what is clearly one of the lamest, dopiest and most ill-conceived spy comedies in movie history, Cedric plays an amnesia victim who wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead FBI agent and a suitcase stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unsure of who he is - the possibilities range all the way from an undercover spy to a local janitor - or how he managed to get himself into such a predicament, the mystery man, Jake, is soon on the run from unknown forces out to nab him and the valuable computer chip it is believed he has in his possession.

This is such a perfectly ridiculous piece of celluloid-wasting cinema that it is scarcely worth the time it takes to watch, let alone comment on, the movie. Suffice it to say that Cedric needs to start looking into getting himself a better agent, while his co-stars - like Lucy Liu, whose career is clearly in as much trouble as Cedric's - should begin deleting this film from their professional resumes as quickly as is humanly possible.