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.

Harold and Kumar will soon be going to Guantanamo Bay, on the big screens. So it would only make sense that Alliance Films would release the original movie, yet again, in time for the new film to hit theatres. Whitecastle, for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time in the States, is a burger joint that sells these cute little square hamburgers that are delicious. The name-dropping in the title of this movie is not (I am assuming) some kind of nefarious product placement, it is merely an indication of the love that the counter-culture in the U.S. has for this particular fast-food chain. (The Beastie Boys have referenced Whitecastle several times over the course of their career.) It is the ultimate stoner fast food, and fat guys like me love it as well because we can eat eleven or twelve burgers at a time. The reference to Whitecastle in the title of this film is more an indication of the popularity of the chain among the stoner crowd, and not a random fast-food selection at all. Harold And Kumar go to McDonalds? No. Burger King? Don’t think so. Wendy’s? Please. Were it not Whitecastle, Big Kahuna Burger might be the only other place that would make sense.

And there is set the tone of the film. Yes, there have been hundreds, even thousands, of these irritating teen-stoner comedies. Or college-stoner comedies, or young-man-in-a-boring-job stoner comedies. But few of them have been as funny as this one. There are definitely stupid, pointless and terrible moments. Riding a cheetah? The old guy with the sores on his face? Come on. Horrible stuff in an otherwise excellent movie. What makes Harold and Kumar work are the stars, Kal Penn (who was recently very, very good in The Namesake and very, very bad in Van Wilder The Rise of Taj) and John Cho, (who was really irritating as the “MILF” guy in American Pie, and has been very good in small TV roles ever since). The chemistry between Penn and Cho is terrific, and they come off as our buddies. We all know guys just like this. Guys who are great, regular, fairly boring guys in everyday life, but who become a little crazy when the idea of getting stoned enters their head on the weekends. They are not the totally useless stoners who sit on their couches and eat Doritos and barely get up when you come over, but rather the ultimate weekend warriors who want to think weed is their way of life, but are wrong. They are stoner-poseurs. Or, at least, Cho is.

So the quest, while it begins as a search for Whitecastle, turns into a search for weed, which then becomes a hunt for girls, and then an escape from the law, and then returns, full circle, to Whitecastle. And while there are the obligatory gross-out jokes (battlesh**s), and the over-the-top moments (hang-gliding), it’s the little things that make this movie better than average. Doogie Howser - Neil Patrick Harris - shows up. As himself. With cocaine and hookers. And he steals their car. An inspired bit of casting. The scenes with John Cho trying to avoid the young woman his family wants him to date are perfect in their realism and simplicity. And the writing of the dialogue between the two stars is bang-on. This new Extreme! Unrated! Edition! is really nothing new. The special features are actually more juvenile than the movie, with the exception of a “back-seat” interview with Cho and Penn. And for those who are Harold and Kumar fanatics (you know who you are, ya stoners) there is a pretty extensive sneak peek at the upcoming Guantanamo film. If you’ve already seen this movie, don’t bother. If you haven’t, at least this gives you the chance to do so again. Just be ready to totally shut off your brain.