Considering the fact that
Code Name: The Cleaner is being released on the first weekend of January (typically a dumping ground for films that the studio has no faith in), and the fact that the film has been sitting on the studio's shelf for almost a year, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the movie is simply uninspired and forced, instead of being unwatchable. For director Les Mayfield, this is a step up from his last film - the awful Samuel L. Jackson/Eugene Levy action comedy,
The Man. That being said, it still doesn't excuse why anyone thought a movie such as this needed to be made. It does very little to stand out, let alone entertain, and seems content to simply waste a workable premise. Even as a star vehicle for stand up comic Cedric the Entertainer, the movie falls flat on its face. All in all,
Code Name: The Cleaner is an uninspired turkey that fails to impress.
When everyman Jake (Cedric the Entertainer) wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead body of the FBI agent, he is troubled to learn that he has no idea how any of this happened, let alone who he even is. His mind's a clean slate, not even able to remember his name, and all he has for a clue is a briefcase full of money. While trying to sneak out of the hotel, he is approached by a seductive beauty named Diane (Nicollete Sheridan from TV's
Desperate Housewives) who claims to be his wife, and wants to help him. However, when Diane takes him back to what is supposed to be their home, something doesn't seem right, and he manages to make a narrow escape before she can reveal her true intentions. Jake finds himself on the run from various FBI agents and shady characters, all who either want to see him dead, or demand to know where a computer chip he supposedly hidden before he lost his memory is located. The only person he can seemingly trust is a lovely and feisty waitress named Gina (Lucy Liu), who works at a local diner and also claims to be romantically involved with Jake. Unlike Diane, Gina seems to not want to hurt him, so he is forced to trust her and try to find out more about his past, which doesn't seem to make any sense. After all, if Jake is just a janitor at a video game company, as Gina claims, then why does he have brief flashbacks of him being a war soldier on a secret mission? And why are there mysterious messages on his answering machine that refer to him as an "agent" of some sort?
At the very least,
Code Name: The Cleaner does grab our attention right away with its opening shot of Jake waking up in a strange bed beside a dead body, and him pacing about the room, realizing that he remembers absolutely nothing, not even his identity. If the movie had played it straight, perhaps the story could have built from here. Unfortunately, this is an action comedy, and although this premise still could have worked in that genre, it just doesn't work here. A lot of this has to do with the character of Jake himself whom, after his brief few minutes of panic over the situation that he finds himself in, immediately turns into a wise cracking sitcom star trapped in a spy story. Almost as soon as he walks out of the hotel room, Jake seems to completely forget about the body back there. As soon as he meets Diane in the hotel lobby, he all but forgets the earlier scene, and starts obnoxiously wooing and sweet talking the girl. For a guy who has possibly murdered an FBI agent, and has no memory of the act or even who he is, Jake sure does seem to be taking it rather well. I don't think anyone in this situation would be throwing out one-liners left and right, and pulling off goofy martial arts moves while doing bad Bruce Lee imitations. That's because this movie doesn't care about the story or the potentially interesting plot. It's all simply a hook to hang Cedric the Entertainer's comic shtick for roughly 90 minutes. Once again, this could still work, but Cedric's humor is too uninspired and lame to muster even a chuckle. (The only time I smiled is when he has a war flashback in an elevator with an old lady, which leads to a very unfortunate result when Jake starts acting out his flashback with the woman.) Since the plot doesn't matter, we find ourselves caring very little about the character, or if he should ever get his memory back.
The characters that surround Jake are your standard types that usually fill these kind of mystery stories. There are crooked cops, an evil businessman behind it all, the woman whom the hero doesn't know if he can trust or not, and the femme fatale. All of the characters know their place and know what they're supposed to do in a story like this, but the screenplay by Robert Adetuyi and George Gallo give them very little to do otherwise. They're not allowed to be funny, because this is Cedric the Entertainer's star vehicle, so they're forced to just simply stand around and watch him be funny. They're not even allowed to be all that active, as there are surprisingly very few action sequences for a movie such as this. When the action does come, it is immediately forgotten, because the filmmakers just can't raise the excitement enough. The final battle scene seems completely pathetic, though it is probably the only time we're ever going to get to see Lucy Liu take out the bad guys with a pair of toilet plungers as weapons. As if that wasn't bad enough, the movie is too incompetent to even stage a decent cat fight between Liu and Nicollete Sheridan. Not only do we barely get to see it (We instead keep on seeing Jake, who is watching the fight, fantasizing about both of the women taking a bubble bath together for some reason.), but the fight itself lasts all of one minute, and can't even be bothered to give us the kind of stuff a good cat fight needs. It made me wonder why they even bothered at all, since the scene that leads to the fight seems horrendously tacked on, as if it were added in post production because someone at the studio felt the movie needed one.
When it comes to performances,
The Cleaner comes up short. This is mainly due to the fact that Cedric the Entertainer and Lucy Liu have absolutely no chemistry together. Not as friends, not as partners, and certainly not as potential lovers. Cedric is a loud, obnoxious motor mouth in this film who is rarely funny, but keeps on talking as if he hopes that if he keeps his mouth moving, something funny is bound to come out of it sooner or later. The end credits feature a variety of outtakes where we witness his alternate takes and jokes on different scenes, all of which are improvised, and all of which are just as unfunny as the joke that made it into the final film. Lucy Liu is a bit more understated in her performance, and at least knows how to shut up when it is needed, but as mentioned before, she just doesn't seem to come across as an appropriate partner for Jake. You often find yourself wondering what she could possibly see in him, and why she would be attracted to him in the first place. Nicollete Sheridan has promise at first in her vampish role, but the movie forgets all about her as soon as Jake escapes from her house. She only gets to sit around talking about her plans for Jake in all of her scenes, and doesn't even get to participate in the film's final battle scene. A half-assed cat fight is no apology for neglecting your film's femme fatale. Aside from these three, the only actor who makes an impression is DeRay Davis, as a co-worker of Jake's from his life before the incident. And that's only because he's more obnoxious and motor mouthed than Cedric is.
Code Name: The Cleaner is a film that's bad, but not quite bad enough to even be memorable. It actually starts to leave your mind the second you walk out of the theater, and you find yourself having to strain your mind to think of anything worth noting. It's just up there on the screen, looking quite pathetic, and never really generating any feelings from the audience, either good or bad. All that's left in the end is some wasted potential and a lot of wondering how this script could have stood out amongst the thousands of scripts that probably pass through a studio every day. I can only assume something got lost from the page to the screen, or that everyone involved needs to be a little bit choosier in picking their projects.
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Considering the fact that Code Name: The Cleaner is being released on the first weekend of January (typically a dumping ground for films that the studio has no faith in), and the fact that the film has been sitting on the studio's shelf for almost a year, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that the movie is simply uninspired and forced, instead of being unwatchable. For director Les Mayfield, this is a step up from his last film - the awful Samuel L. Jackson/Eugene Levy action comedy, The Man. That being said, it still doesn't excuse why anyone thought a movie such as this needed to be made. It does very little to stand out, let alone entertain, and seems content to simply waste a workable premise. Even as a star vehicle for stand up comic Cedric the Entertainer, the movie falls flat on its face. All in all, Code Name: The Cleaner is an uninspired turkey that fails to impress.
When everyman Jake (Cedric the Entertainer) wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead body of the FBI agent, he is troubled to learn that he has no idea how any of this happened, let alone who he even is. His mind's a clean slate, not even able to remember his name, and all he has for a clue is a briefcase full of money. While trying to sneak out of the hotel, he is approached by a seductive beauty named Diane (Nicollete Sheridan from TV's Desperate Housewives) who claims to be his wife, and wants to help him. However, when Diane takes him back to what is supposed to be their home, something doesn't seem right, and he manages to make a narrow escape before she can reveal her true intentions. Jake finds himself on the run from various FBI agents and shady characters, all who either want to see him dead, or demand to know where a computer chip he supposedly hidden before he lost his memory is located. The only person he can seemingly trust is a lovely and feisty waitress named Gina (Lucy Liu), who works at a local diner and also claims to be romantically involved with Jake. Unlike Diane, Gina seems to not want to hurt him, so he is forced to trust her and try to find out more about his past, which doesn't seem to make any sense. After all, if Jake is just a janitor at a video game company, as Gina claims, then why does he have brief flashbacks of him being a war soldier on a secret mission? And why are there mysterious messages on his answering machine that refer to him as an "agent" of some sort?
At the very least, Code Name: The Cleaner does grab our attention right away with its opening shot of Jake waking up in a strange bed beside a dead body, and him pacing about the room, realizing that he remembers absolutely nothing, not even his identity. If the movie had played it straight, perhaps the story could have built from here. Unfortunately, this is an action comedy, and although this premise still could have worked in that genre, it just doesn't work here. A lot of this has to do with the character of Jake himself whom, after his brief few minutes of panic over the situation that he finds himself in, immediately turns into a wise cracking sitcom star trapped in a spy story. Almost as soon as he walks out of the hotel room, Jake seems to completely forget about the body back there. As soon as he meets Diane in the hotel lobby, he all but forgets the earlier scene, and starts obnoxiously wooing and sweet talking the girl. For a guy who has possibly murdered an FBI agent, and has no memory of the act or even who he is, Jake sure does seem to be taking it rather well. I don't think anyone in this situation would be throwing out one-liners left and right, and pulling off goofy martial arts moves while doing bad Bruce Lee imitations. That's because this movie doesn't care about the story or the potentially interesting plot. It's all simply a hook to hang Cedric the Entertainer's comic shtick for roughly 90 minutes. Once again, this could still work, but Cedric's humor is too uninspired and lame to muster even a chuckle. (The only time I smiled is when he has a war flashback in an elevator with an old lady, which leads to a very unfortunate result when Jake starts acting out his flashback with the woman.) Since the plot doesn't matter, we find ourselves caring very little about the character, or if he should ever get his memory back.
The characters that surround Jake are your standard types that usually fill these kind of mystery stories. There are crooked cops, an evil businessman behind it all, the woman whom the hero doesn't know if he can trust or not, and the femme fatale. All of the characters know their place and know what they're supposed to do in a story like this, but the screenplay by Robert Adetuyi and George Gallo give them very little to do otherwise. They're not allowed to be funny, because this is Cedric the Entertainer's star vehicle, so they're forced to just simply stand around and watch him be funny. They're not even allowed to be all that active, as there are surprisingly very few action sequences for a movie such as this. When the action does come, it is immediately forgotten, because the filmmakers just can't raise the excitement enough. The final battle scene seems completely pathetic, though it is probably the only time we're ever going to get to see Lucy Liu take out the bad guys with a pair of toilet plungers as weapons. As if that wasn't bad enough, the movie is too incompetent to even stage a decent cat fight between Liu and Nicollete Sheridan. Not only do we barely get to see it (We instead keep on seeing Jake, who is watching the fight, fantasizing about both of the women taking a bubble bath together for some reason.), but the fight itself lasts all of one minute, and can't even be bothered to give us the kind of stuff a good cat fight needs. It made me wonder why they even bothered at all, since the scene that leads to the fight seems horrendously tacked on, as if it were added in post production because someone at the studio felt the movie needed one.
When it comes to performances, The Cleaner comes up short. This is mainly due to the fact that Cedric the Entertainer and Lucy Liu have absolutely no chemistry together. Not as friends, not as partners, and certainly not as potential lovers. Cedric is a loud, obnoxious motor mouth in this film who is rarely funny, but keeps on talking as if he hopes that if he keeps his mouth moving, something funny is bound to come out of it sooner or later. The end credits feature a variety of outtakes where we witness his alternate takes and jokes on different scenes, all of which are improvised, and all of which are just as unfunny as the joke that made it into the final film. Lucy Liu is a bit more understated in her performance, and at least knows how to shut up when it is needed, but as mentioned before, she just doesn't seem to come across as an appropriate partner for Jake. You often find yourself wondering what she could possibly see in him, and why she would be attracted to him in the first place. Nicollete Sheridan has promise at first in her vampish role, but the movie forgets all about her as soon as Jake escapes from her house. She only gets to sit around talking about her plans for Jake in all of her scenes, and doesn't even get to participate in the film's final battle scene. A half-assed cat fight is no apology for neglecting your film's femme fatale. Aside from these three, the only actor who makes an impression is DeRay Davis, as a co-worker of Jake's from his life before the incident. And that's only because he's more obnoxious and motor mouthed than Cedric is.
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