Cleaner

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.

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

As a finnish movie fan, it's always interesting to see a new film from Renny Harlin. Especially when Samuel L. Jackson, one of the most distinctive actors ever, is in it.

Jackson plays a crime scene cleaner, which you think would be what this movie is surrounded on. With all the C.S.I. stuff out there, it might interest some. But the scene where the story starts actually tastes like an idea where to start the story, not a theme for a movie where to excavate.

The plot is an uninspiring one, from the beginning to the end. There are some attempted details and twists to bring some life and excitement to this story. I'm sorry to say they really fail. There is no depth in this movie, and every attempt to create some is exactly that - an attempt.

This is bad cause the acting is pretty and the directing is nice. I can't really understand what the director saw in this script. Maybe the idea of creating something without special effects and exploiting the CSI-thing.

I give this one 6/10. All points going to actors and the director.

The movie is categorized as "Crime / Thriller". If you want anything good (and new) like that I suggest you see "Awake".

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.

The concept of cleaner is really interesting. An ex-cop becoming a crime scene cleaner. It's unique. We usually see ex cops becoming PI's or something similar. It's kinda gross to think about it and even more to see it but it's a real thing so it got my attention. The cast is also excellent. Big names like Samuel L. Jackson and Ed Harris will always catch your attention. Unfortunately that's where the good ends.

The convoluted plot is weak and unbelievable. Corruption, murders, betrayal, vengeance, affairs... it's like a bad telenovela. The ending is as weak as the plot. When the credits roll you're left with the thought of "what the hell was that?" Maybe someday someone can take the good idea and make it into something worth watching. This was not.