Cleaner

The only thing that is interesting in this yet-another addition to the police corruption thriller sub-genre is the subdued performance from Samuel L. Jackson, an actor better known for playing potty-mouthed, jive-talkin' nigga brothers, as retired policeman and single father Tom Cutler who runs a crime-scene cleaning business. One day Tom does what looks like an everyday job but which turns out to be a set-up.  With the police in the form of Det. Jim Vargas (Luis Guzmán)  breathing down his neck Tom needs to find out who is using him as a patsy and turns to his former partner in the police department, Eddie Lorenzo (Ed Harris) for help.

When your principal female is Eva Mendes playing a well-heeled housewife you know that your film is more about appearance than substance and Cleaner is indeed slickly packaged but shallow.sticking as it does so closely to the conventions of the crime genre that we know even before it gets going where it’s going to end up.

Although the script by Matthew Aldrich starts well enough, wryly introducing us to Tom as he describes his job in a voice-over, once it establishes the set-up (and weakly so as this depends narratively on Tom ringing the doorbell to return a key which in the real world he would not do, simply replacing it under the pot from where he took it) despite its potentially juicy ingredients (one might cite Chinatown, 1974 as a distant benchmark here) it fails to do anything interesting with them as the story dutifully unfolds. The only exception are the scenes involving Ed Harris but his performance is so ripe with homo-erotic intensity that they only manage to lend a slightly grotesque blip to what is otherwise a run-of-the-mill affair.

FYI: For a more engaging take on the crime-scene cleaning business see Sunshine Cleaning (2008). 

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