If you lived in Sioux Falls, this weekend you could see Freedom Writers, a teacher-reaches-troubled-kids movie with Oscar winner Hilary Swank, or Children of Men, an intelligent science fiction film featuring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore.

      If you lived in Omaha, you could go to Dreamgirls or Babel, films that were released earlier but haven’t played Aberdeen.  If you lived in a different Aberdeen – say, the one in Maryland – you might see Blood Diamond, another movie getting Oscar buzz that hasn’t played here.

      But you live in Aberdeen, South Dakota, which the corporate powers-that-be for Carmike Cinemas have concluded doesn’t deserve major, serious films.  After a New Year’s weekend that saw no new openings here, there are just two new films this week.

      One, Happily N’Ever After, is an animated fairy-tale parody.  Normally, that’s my kind of movie, but this one inspired little desire to pay Friday-night prices – especially after universally bad national reviews, the kindest of which called it “underwhelming.”  Other descriptions were “offensive,” “annoying,” and “criminally short on ideas” – or my personal favorite, in the Washington Post: “a film the whole family will want to avoid.”

      So that leaves Code Name: The Cleaner, a sort-of comedy, sort-of suspense flick starring Cedric the Entertainer.  Perhaps we should boycott the theatre until it brings in more adult fare.

      Not that The Cleaner is totally awful.  It is, in fact, a perfectly acceptable B-movie; my objection is that it takes up screen space that could be filled with one of the more interesting films mentioned above.

      The film’s comedy is sporadic at best, with the biggest laugh of the night coming in response to an Allstate “accident forgiveness” ad that preceded the trailers.  Most of the humor in the film itself springs from the “fish out of water” premise of a janitor being inserted into a serious spy flick. 

      Jake Rodgers (Cedric) awakens next to a slain FBI agent in a posh hotel room, with no idea of his own identity or how he came to be there.  This is a classic setup for a suspense film, as the hero seeks the secret of his own past before he is killed by mysterious forces.  Again following a generic script, the amnesiac janitor is the only one who can locate a dangerous weapon (in this case a computer chip), and the issue of who are the good guys and who the bad remains in question for about half the film.

      Much of The Cleaner is predictable, given its opening situation, and as a suspense movie it isn’t any worse than dozens of other films through the years.

      Cedric keeps his considerable comic talents under wraps for much of the movie, although he does give a hilarious performance as a Dutch folk dancer while trying to escape his pursuers.  The culminating action sequence is moderately clever, although you could probably anticipate it knowing Jake is really a janitor, not the superspy he imagines himself to be.

      Supporting performances come from Lucy Liu as a waitress (or is she?) whom Jake has apparently been dating, and Nicolette Sheridan (Desperate Housewives) as his wife (or maybe not).  Liu’s experience as one of Charley’s Angels is put to good use in the action sequences and supports one of the funniest of the out-takes that appear during the closing credits.

      There’s also an FBI agent of ambiguous moral status (Callum Keith Rennie) and a tycoon-villain (Mark Dacascos, of TV’s The Crow) with a surprising physical resemblance to Barack Obama.

      The Cleaner isn’t terrible, but it isn’t particularly good, either.  If you must see it, better to wait for the DVD than to spend your money on it now.      

        This review appeared in the Aberdeen American News on January 7, 2007.

Return to Wally Hastings's Film Reviews.
Return to Wally Hastings's Home Page.

This page last updated on January 10, 2007.