Cynical Cinema

Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of movie you get when producers look at all the other movies and TV shows that have been made in the past year, and try to make one just like that.  But with a new idea that will make this movie seem different!  And they’ve already done the spy thing, they’ve done the cop-on-the-edge thing, they’ve done the Negotiator (also with Jackson), and they’ve done every combination and permutation of the characters from CSI and Bones and Cold Case and Medium and every other cop-related profession.  But wait - we have never done a movie about the guy who cleans up the blood after murders!  This is so NEW!  Oh, it doesn’t matter that it’s the exact same story we’ve used in every movie and TV show over the past ten years, this character is new.  He cleans up blood!  Get it?

So you get a movie about a murder, and a guy trying to solve it, and police corruption and extramarital affairs and betrayal and father-daughter relationships and blah blah blah, ground up in the meat grinder of every script ever written, and spit out into this movie with the fresh new character idea.  And we have Samuel L. Jackson as the guy who comes by after cops are done their investigations and cleans up the blood and gross stuff at murder scenes.  This, really has almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  It just gives the film a title and a new, fresh main character who is still a cop and still solves crimes but isn’t the same.  And next thing you know, he gets caught up in a web of intrigue that involves a mysterious hot chick (Eva Mendes) and his former best friend and cop-buddy (Ed Harris).  Be warned - the next bits here contain spoilers!

In watching Cleaner, I discovered a few bothersome things.  First of all, one of my favourite actors, Ed Harris, has somehow become a bit of a caricature.  I was sad when Harris showed up, as Jackson’s best friend, and I thought - oh, no!  You can’t trust Ed Harris!  Think of Gone Baby Gone, A History of Violence, and now this!  I knew it the second he stepped onto the screen.  Ed Harris is just too big an actor to play second-banana, the hero’s best friend.  If he’s in there as something other than the star, he’s the surprise hero cop, or the bad guy.  That’s it.  And then Eva Mendes shows up.  And I’m thinking  - oh no!  Don’t trust Eva Mendes either!  She just looks like a vamp who will screw you over.  And then there’s Luis Guzman, who I really like.  He seems untrustworthy, which likely means that by the end he will be a good guy, and an ally to our hero.  And lo and behold, all of these assumptions turned out to be true!  This is either because these actors are now typecast, or because the director somehow telegraphed the ending.

 And I believe that the latter is true.  The direction in this movie, by Renny Harlin, is clumsy at best.  Harlin, I would argue, has never directed a good movie in his career.  His previous best was The Long Kiss Goodnight, also with Samuel L. Jackson, and it was average at best.  Too often he seems to try to add a small twist to existing plots and cliched scripts, and ends up making boring film.  And Cleaner is no exception.  The clumsiness is most apparent in the relationship between Jackson and his daughter, played very ably by Keke Palmer.  But the best acting in the world couldn’t save Cleaner from the clumsy, awkward, obvious and irritating moments between the two.  Their relationship swings wildly from that father-daughter sharing-everything warm and fuzzy one to the absentee-father-who-lets-his-work-dominate-his-home-life one.  Sometimes within the same scene!  And the latter relationship culminates in that oh-so-obnoxious cliche, him MISSING HER SOCCER GAME!  I HATE the parent-missing-the-child’s-soccer-game cliche. 

And the other, close-bond father-daughter relationship culminates with another horrible cliche that I hate.  The daughter, having to choose between her distant father and the trusted family friend who all of a sudden can’t be trusted, chooses to shoot the formerly trusted family friend.  I hate this ending.  It hasn’t been original or interesting since the third time it was used, in 1923.  Oh, come on.  Just an example of the powerfully unoriginal, clumsily constructed movie that is the Cleaner.  It is so neatly wrapped up in a tidy little package at the end that it looks really stupid.  This movie really needed to be far rougher around the edges to even keep my attention for more than half the film.  Avoid this, it sucks.

We Own the Night is decent, but not great. Gene Siskel used to say that a movie with great actors was only good if you would rather watch that movie than watch those same actors eat lunch. (Which is the big failing of the Ocean’s Twelve-Thirteen-through-Seventy-six series of films.) And I would certainly like to watch Joaquin Phoenix, Robert Duvall and Mark Wahlberg have a spirited conversation over lunch. Only slightly more would I like to watch this movie again. Now, usually that’s an analogy used for vanity pictures, like that Ocean’s series. Which I keep referencing for some reason. Either because I just watched The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, or because I have a poster of George Clooney in a wet T-Shirt looking down on me from above my computer. Boy, he’s dreamy.

The thing is, I can’t decide whether We Own the Night is a vanity picture or not. It seems like one, especially for Wahlberg and Phoenix, who seem to have played these characters many times before. They are brothers, Wahlberg a cop and Phoenix a night club owner. Duvall is their father, the chief of police. When Duvall and Wahlberg approach Phoenix to help them with some information that could lead to a major drug bust, he refuses to help. He wants to distance himself from the police life that is his family. So much so that he no longer goes by his family name, having chosen to use his mother’s name after her death. Wahlberg and his unit stage a raid on the bar, during which his brother is arrested. The cops are trying to nail a particularly unpleasant dealer named Vadim. Afterward, Wahlberg is attacked and almost killed by Vadim, who then tells Phoenix all about it - they have different last names, see, and this dealer does not know they are related. Then a bunch of stuff happens, brothers fighting brothers, brothers loving brothers, brothers sticking by their father, father sacrificing for the brothers…all kind of family stuff that sort of rings hollow.

The movie flows fine, the story works decently, and the performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall are pretty good. But that’s about it. The supporting cast is not great. Eva Mendes, as Phoienix’s girlfriend, is mostly useless, except as someone who can get upset at his actions. The bad-guy drug dealer is barely seen, barely in the movie, and certainly does not give off a sense of dread or of being dangerous. Except for his very long Steven Seagal-type pony tail. That means drug lord. Anyone with a pony tail is a drug lord. Or Steven Seagal. Or into aromatherapy. Whatever. In the end, there is not much to recommend this movie. And there is not much to say against it. So it’s just plain not much of a movie.