Code Name: The Cleaner
DIR: Les Mayfield • WRI: Robert Adetuyi, George Gallo • PROD: Brett Ratner, Eric Rhone, Jay Stern, Brad Jensen, Cedric the Entertainer, John Cheng • DOP: David Franco • ED: Michael Matzdorff • DES: Douglas Higgins • CAST: Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu, Nicollette Sheridan, Mark Dacascos, Callum Keith Rennie

A film can be judged by how many times one looks at one’s watch during the show. Code Name: The Cleaner earned an impressive four time checks.

The premise could have been a good one. A comic version of The Bourne Identity, wherein a not-so-dashing man wakes up with amnesia into a bizarre situation. He desperately tries to persuade himself, and everyone around him, that he is an elite super-spy but has the sneaking suspicion that he is just a janitor. Treated right it could have led to an enjoyable piece of brainless, action-comedy fluff. Instead, it’s just brainless.

That the film was written and rewritten by several people at several different times is painfully obvious. It has all the cohesion of ten-year-old Sellotape. Which is not entirely a reflection on the writers as some of the actors also had a hand in writing their characters.

The producers wanted a film with universal appeal, starring an ‘Everyman’ type of guy. However Cedric the Entertainer’s (The Honeymooners) portrayal of ‘Jake’ is more like an every fourteen-year-old boy than everyman. A teenager with puerile dreams of being a James Bond type with fast cars and attractive women throwing themselves at him. And no idea of what to do with the attractive women when he catches them.

Lucy Liu and Nicollette Sheridan, the aforementioned women, are both competent actors but struggle playing two-dimensional parodies of characters that they are better known for in Charlie’s Angels and Desperate Housewives.

Definitely the best part of the film is a brilliantly choreographed, if more than usually improbable dance sequence. Though entirely arbitrary, it is also one of the few genuinely amusing points in the film. Mostly, however, it is riddled with the kind of unfortunate ‘humourous’ situations that would insult the intelligence of even the lowest common denominator. Requisite mistaken gay identity jokes. Catfights. The risible notion that arousal counteracts memory loss. Even the out-takes have all the comedy contrived out of them.

Don’t do it.

Lisa Gallagher
(Read biog here)

Rated 12A (see IFCO website for details)
Code Name: The Cleaner is released on 7th December 2007
Code Name: The Cleaner – Official website