What happens when someone dies in a house? After the body is taken away, someone has to clean up. If the person was murdered, that can be an especially dirty job. If you aren't up for doing it yourself, you can call a guy like Tom Cutler (Samuel L. Jackson). A former police detective, Tom now has a cleaning business specializing in this sort of thing. Business is good until one of his jobs starts to smell off to him. When he goes to return a house key, the wife of the deceased (Eva Mendes) knows nothing about the cleaning or even the death. Tom starts sniffing around and gets caught up in a web of murder and police corruption.
It's a good noir setup, with a great cast that includes Ed Harris, Luis Guzman, and the legendary Robert Forster. I liked it, but I couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling that “Cleaner” should be better than it is. The plot doesn't quite gel. Every time the story gets interesting, it grinds to a halt so we can have a hard-to-watch father-daughter scene between Tom and his kid. The story builds to a ridiculous climax that includes a “child-in-danger” scene that you see coming a mile away. If they had left out the entire family subplot, I think “Cleaner” could have been a very serviceable neo-noir.
2 stars out of 5
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