Cleaner

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.