Code Name: The Cleaner

Friday night my wife and I went to see Code Name: The Cleaner, staring Cedric Kyles (AKA Cedric the Entertainer) and Lucy Liu. It's about Jake, a man who wakes up in a hotel room, next to a dead body, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As events unfold around him, he starts to recollect that he is a secret agent, and puts together that he was working undercover as a janitor on a deadly mission.

This was another fun movie. It had a PG-13 rating but I would say that it was a fairly mild PG-13 (a few shootouts and Nicollette Sheridan in her undies), so I wouldn't worry too much about taking a 13 year old to see it. It's the first movie I've seen with Cedric in the lead role and only the second with him in it at all (Serving Sara was the first). I really liked him. He was absolutely hilarious without going over the top. Of course Lucy Liu is always a sight to behold.

The rating it has received on IMDb was a dismal 3.0 but that was because a significant number (52%) of the votes were a 1. I suspect that the movie or one of it's actors really perturbed some group, so they retaliated with a vote drive. There is no way this movie rated a 1. I personally gave it a 7 and my wife tells me we will own this.

Incidentally, stick around for the first half of the credits. The show some very good outtakes.

Cedric the Entertainer is certainly a talented comedian, but with a script this boring and stupid, even he couldn't breathe life into this horrible mess of a comedy. Despite the bad reviews, I was still slightly eager to check out the movie. The year has just started and already I have a candidate for the worst movies of 2007. The spy comedy has been done to death. And the fact that the writers had nothing new to bring to the table didn't help. I must've chuckled a total of 5 times, and received no laughs whatsoever. As the movie (thankfully) approached its conclusion, I jokingly thought to myself, "This is probably one of those flicks that contains a gag reel over the closing credits." Well...I was right! I frequently disapprove of gag reels over the credits of good movies. When you show a gag reel after a bad movie, it's like rubbing salt on a wound. The only part of this movie worth checking out is Nicolette Sheridan doing an erotic dance in her lingerie. If the movie ever makes it to HBO On Demand, I suggest you just fast-forward to that particular scene, mute the sound, and watch it in a loop. Yes, it's that friggin' hot! As for the comedy, expect your usual assortment of bland, crude, sitcom-style gags. If you can't see the punchlines to each gag coming a mile away, you might want to consider getting a cat scan. In one scene, a janitor (one of Cedric's co-workers) is interrogated by a federal agent in a restroom. The agent points a gun at him, urging him to give him some information about Cedric's character. The janitor is an aspiring rapper, and goes on a whole rant about how he wants to be shot, since he wants to be the first rapper to write his songs while in a coma. He bends over, begging the agent to shoot him in the backside. The agent eventually leaves the restroom, as the janitor keeps screaming out, "Put a bullet in my a**! Put it in my a**! Put it in my as**!" And--guess what--one of his fellow janitors strolls into the restroom as he continues to scream out, "Put it in my a**!" Unless you're a teenager who will laugh at all things scatological, you might want to consider putting a bullet in your own rear end for finding an outrageously stupid gag like that funny. My God! How screenwriters actually get paid to write this crap still boggles my mind! A man of Cedric's talent is capable of doing much, much more, as he's shown in the "Barbershop" movies. But when given rotten material like this, he attempts to mend each failed joke with improvisation, which in turn makes the jokes even more annoying.

I don't know why some people slander this movie. They should get some antidepressants or something - somethings not right with these people anyway.

This movie is well made, has good actors doing a great job, interesting (but somewhat predictable) plot! It has pretty much everything you want from a nice action/comedy movie and I certainly enjoyed the movie a lot.

I almost gave it a seven but I'm a cheap b*stard - and even if it's closer to a seven than six - it falls just short of it... =)

I just made up my mind - why the h*ll not...

This film begins with a man named "Jake Rogers" (Cedric Antonio Kyles) waking up in a bed at a hotel and finding a dead body right next to him. To make matters even worse, because of a recent head injury he not only doesn't remember how he got into this situation, but he also doesn't remember who he is. However, as luck would have it there is a small attache case with approximately $250,000 in it and an attractive blonde named "Diane" (Nicollette Sheridan) waiting for him in the hotel lobby who claims to be his wife. And to top it off he is apparently quite rich as well. However, that doesn't seem to matter as much as it should because he soon realizes that there are people out to kill him over a computer chip that he doesn't know anything about. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film definitely had some good humor here and there. Likewise, having two attractive actresses like Lucy Liu (as the waitress named "Gina") and the aforementioned Nicollette Sheridan certainly didn't hurt matters either. Having said that, however, I must admit that some of the comedy was rather low-brow and the film could have used a bit more suspense or drama as well. Even so, I thought that this was an okay film for the time spent and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Average.

Codename: The Cleaner reviewed by Sam Osborn

Welcome to January, generally known as the first of two months that consist mostly of studio duds poured discretely from the back of the release slate and into your multiplexes. Like a late August release, January and February releases generally spell 'trash,' with the best of them offering only a nonsensical relief from the heavy, fading awards season. Thus, we have Codename: The Cleaner.

It's the latest work from director Les Mayfield, a man whose earlier films (Flubber, American Outlaws, The Man) are best described as righteously mediocre. This January gem weighs in on a case of missing identity and FBI espionage with Cedric the Entertainer playing Jake Rodgers, waking up in a hotel bed with a dead FBI agent and a cut above his ear. His memory's been fried, leaving him without a name and only fragments of what looks to be a secrets ops combat mission batting around his brain. Diane—played by Nicollete Sheridan, whose beauty has been stretched and manipulated to the point of mimicking a mask from White Chicks—approaches Jake in the hotel lobby, filling him in on some important details pertaining to their supposed marriage and occupation of a bloated estate mansion. It all turns out to be farce, however, when Jake overhears Diane plotting to send Jake into cardiac arrest over a bit of information surrounding a computer chip. Soon Jake's on the run, doing his best play-pretend imitation of spy work, trying to hunt down the computer chip and unveil his own identity.

Like last year's You, Me, and Dupree, Codename: The Cleaner banks heavily on the likability of its lead, giving him the screen-time equivalent of carte blanche. But where Owen Wilson's sly, sandy-haired innocence can grow tiresome, Cedric's rotund antics are nothing if not charming. He leaps to great and often desperate lengths to mine a chuckle, but sometimes surprises us by shoveling out something truly hilarious. So it's a shame that the material surrounding him offers little more than static. Lucy Liu is superbly misused as Jake's girlfriend, rattling off forced punch-lines and rickety, unfitting "sistah" feistiness to match Ms. Sheridan's miscasting as the young, busty blonde (the joke here, I suppose, is that Ms Sheridan's peaked forty). The plot feels improvised; so weak that is seems to modify itself according to whatever improvisation Cedric throws at the script. It all comes together like a Jackie Chan Hong Kong action picture, only with Cedric the Entertainer doing the karate. It works, but only if you slouch in your seat and let your ears and eyes glaze over in a popcorn haze. It is January, after all.

Sam Osborn