Die Hard 2/The Long Kiss Goodnight director Renny Harlin has
long reigned as one of Hollywood's preeminent vulgarians. When super-producer
Joel Silver wanted to transform Andrew "Dice" Clay from potty-mouthed laffsmith
to big-budget action hero in The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, Harlin was the slickster
he tapped for the job. Similarly, when Paul Schrader's Exorcist: Dominion got art and ambition all
over a lucrative film franchise built on a solid foundation of head-spinning,
foul-mouthed demons, and projectile vomiting, Harlin was recruited to add the
flash, trash, and gratuitous gore missing from Schrader's more sober,
philosophical prequel. So it's a profound disappointment that Harlin's latest
effort, the direct-to-DVD thriller Cleaner, lacks even the vulgar energy of Harlin's
lesser films, in spite of a centrally present iconic badass legendary for
yelling profanely about airborne reptiles.
Samuel L. Jackson leads a stellar, sleepwalking
cast as an ex-cop and single father who ekes out a peculiar living cleaning up
crime scenes. Jackson leads an orderly, fastidious existence with his
precocious daughter, but his past comes back to haunt him when he becomes
entangled in a web of deception involving his ex-partner (Ed Harris),
widespread police corruption, and a mysterious woman (Eva Mendes) whose
whistleblower husband has disappeared.
When Cleaner slipped into the Toronto Film Festival last
year, festival-goers had to wonder if Harlin had made a great leap forward
artistically and was ready to trade in slick pyrotechnics for arty drama. But
don't let the film's highbrow cast, portentous tone, and leisurely pace fool
you: Cleaner is
just as empty and formulaic as his previous films, just much, much duller. The
best the film can manage theme-wise is a groaningly obvious central metaphor
about how Jackson's tortured conscience and tangled past can't be cleaned as
easily as his crime scenes. In spite of heavyweight character actors like
Jackson, Harris, Robert Forster, and Luis Guzmán, Cleaner feels unmistakably like
the plodding, arbitrary introductory episode of a cop show that'd be lucky to
make it past the pilot stage. Low-energy and grindingly mediocre, it adds a
whole new dimension to Harlin's wildly uneven oeuvre: tedium.
Key features: Melodramatic deleted
scenes and a reasonably engaging Harlin commentary that hits all the expected
notes: gushing over actors, technical details, bits o' pretension, etc.