Review of Cleaner (2007) by Sergio E — 10 May 2011

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.

Widower, single father and former cop Tom Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) now has an unusually gruesome vocation -- having to immaculately clean up even the grossest and abjectly gory of crime scenes, purposefully leaving the area so spotless that those next to occupy the premises would never have a clue of there being even the slightest thing amiss. But when he's called in to sterilize one particular wealthy suburban residence following a brutal shooting, Carver is deeply shocked to learn that his meticulous skills may not only have erased crucial undocumented evidence, but might have dangerously entangled himself in a dirty and far-reaching cover up, as well. Directed by Renny Harlin and co-starring Eva Mendes, Ed Harris, Keke Palmer, and Luis Gusman, Cleaner is a dark, gritty and suspenseful crime thriller that proves that the grim task of simply cleaning up gore can be the one of the dirtiest jobs there is.