Cleaners

Contract Workers (read Killers) Roxi (Osment) and Veronica (Cheriqui) are sent by Mother (Gina Gershon) on a mission to take a car to a certain location. Seems simple enough until they have a flat tire and need to look in the trunk. What they see changes everything.

This could have been pretty good had the Director not fooled around with loud, uncomfortable music and inserting scene shots as thought they were bullets throughout. This was most distracting and gave off that cheesy vibe. The dialogues and acting were pretty good. Okay, we do get a little tired of Gina Gershon curling her lips when the camera is on her. Quite distracting.

Originally, I thought this would be about female assassins, but this story didn't go that way. Maybe in another movie with the Roxie and Veronica, who are pretty good together.

This story takes a page from a Jason Statham movie SAFE and if you have seen that movie, then you know what this is all about. Kind of.

The title is misleading. Cleaners are people who clean up crime scenes or bodies from crime scenes. Here the crime scenes were created. See?

There are a lot of hand-to-hand fights and they are very good. No CGI.

It was the uncomfortable music and scene shots that came in like a Gatling Gun that proved too over the top. (4/10)

Violence: Yes. Sex: No. Nudity: No. Language: Yes.

I watched season 1 and 2 in 2014. Somehow I missed to write a review here. But this gave me also the opportunity to re-watch the show.

'Cleaners' has a fast, humorous, sometimes brutal style, you can even say it is a parody of ultra-cool modern pulp fiction. Dialogs are short, cliché-loaded on purpose, fighting scenes often over-the-top. The show plays with a number of genres, characters and plots, exploits them to a point, but also let them be where they belong, maybe even to honor them. There are a lot of moments where one can recognize some of the ancestors the show 'cites'. I think the movie 'Face Off' is one of them.

If one cannot stand the cut and some scene change, that's understandable. Some people may find that annoying. I liked it, as it is a big difference to so many other shows.

The show is remarkable reckless to its own story-line, but also very kind to its characters. Everyone, even the most notorious killer, gets a positive or sympathetic side.

I found the balance between dark comedy and thriller just right, at least in the first season. The second season is a bit slower, a bit less funny, and a bit too serious sometimes, but has at least 12 episodes instead of 6. The episode length is always about 22 minutes including credits at ~24fps.

Of course there are some mistakes here and there where you have to raise your 'suspension of disbelief', like in so many other crime shows. That is not an extra minus for a show like this.

About the acting, most entertaining for me was Gina Gershon as 'Mother', Clifton Collins as her 'Samurai' Julian is like a character from Kill Bill, and Emily Osment makes a great Harley Quinn-like companion to a bit colorless Emmanuele Chriqui. Her Veronica (or simply 'V') is the only one that didn't quite convince me, she sometimes looks insecure, what she should currently express, or what her role is in this mess.

But 'Cleaners' is overall very entertaining and funny, so I have to give 7 stars.

12 April 2014: 1. I rented the DVD from Red Box because I thought it was a regular movie. 2. The second reason I rented is because of cute Emmanuelle Chriqui. She is so cute and has great sex appeal. The first time I saw cute Emmanuelle was in a movie with singer Usher "In The Mix" in year 2005 and then again with Adam Sandler in "You Don't Mess With Zohan" in year 2008.

The rest of the cast was okay. Gina Gershon did a good job, but my biggest complaint is because there was too much unnecessary profanity. Some of the scenes were not realistic enough, but in the movies or on television, I guess anything can will happen. Also, I did NOT like the violence on the women where the men were punching and kicking the girls. There are way to many movies now with violence on women/girls in rape scenes or women being abused by men.

I love this show! Fast-paced only 1/2 hour. Dialogue is clever, witty and funny. Lots of action.

Great and original.

Sat through some episodes and was constantly wondering why this series was ever made. Never seen such bad, ridiculous action shots. I mean, a shout-out in a room 5x 5 meters, a 1/2" wooden table stopping the bullets from a machine gun for you? A guy being strangled by pulling a plastic bag over his face? (stick your finger through it, moron!) A fist fight against a priest in habit, face hooded invisibly, because it's really the 'stunt' man... Who came up with this idea? All time low in cinematography. I'd demand to erase my name from the title roll... Really really: you do not want to spend a precious second of your life watching this. Spend it on reading a book.