Ramius here, doing the dirty work. Here's the boss man, Clint, with an early look at a film I was looking forward to until I read this review... "Cleaner" starring Samuel L.Jackson, Ed Harris and Eva Mendes. Sounds like someone needs to do a "Snakes on a Plane 2" - and quick!
Clint's Review : The Cleaner
I think after “Snakes on a Plane” it’s pretty clear to all of us that Samuel L.Jackson chooses movies based on whether or not he gets to play a character he hasn’t played before – even if it’s a cussing cop aboard a flight full of giant reptiles.
“Say what? You’re offering me the role of the homosexual horse who learns sign language from his blind owner? Fuck yeah, I’m in! Where do I sign!?”.
The man will do anything – as long as he hasn’t done it before. As we speak he’s probably nagging his agent to get him a movie in which he can play a white female Lesbian who becomes Harlem’s biggest drug dealer.
Jackson again plays someone he hasn’t played before in Renny Harlin’s “Cleaner” – but that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t played that exact same character. In this case, that’d be Angela Jones, who played a crime-scene clean-up girl who gets in over her head with bad guys in the Quentin Tarantino produced “Curdled” (1995). Pity Jackson didn’t place a call to his old “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown” director before signing on - - he might’ve then realised the idea was as stale as the bit of bread at the bottom of my kitchen bin.
Maybe what attracted Jackson to the project was the fact that Renny Harlin was directing. Though by no means a fabulous director – his films usually range from good to absolute shite, such as “Exorcist : The Beginning” or “Driven” – the Finnish director did give Jackson one of his coolest roles of his career earlier on, that of Geena Davis’s unlikely partner in the 1996 action smash “Long Kiss Goodnight”. Jackson may have expected to be doing something just as good, if not something just as original.
In the pic, Tom (Jackson), an extremely hygienic man who uses this urge in his professional life as a crime scene cleaner, becomes involved in a job he later finds out was a covered up murder. He consequently gets tied in to a web of deception, that unearth his own family's long buried pain and secrets.
Though Jackson and co-star Ed Harris are quite good in the movie, and the dialogue is zippy enough, there’s just something very under-whelming about the whole storyline – its not exciting enough, there’s nothing to hold your attention.
Not even a “I’m cleaning brains here, mother fucker!”, could save this one.
- Clint Morris
Discuss this article in our Forums
