By Robert Scucci
| Published
A few years ago, I stumbled upon a now-banned Instagram feed that focused on one thing: cleaning up crime scenes. Before you start judging me, just know that this was a natural escalation, and the same thing could happen to you if you’re not careful. I’m really into those ASMR videos of people powerwashing houses and driveways. This obsession led me to lawn care videos because I rent and don’t have a lawn, and I dream of one day coming up with a sophisticated mowing pattern of my own. It was a wholesome, vicarious arrangement. One thing eventually led to another, and the next thing you know, I’m wondering if this crime scene guy’s proprietary blend of cleaning agents would pass a luminol test after he scraped all sorts of miscellaneous chunks and fluids off the carpeting in question.
After all is said and done, it’s probably a good thing that account got shut down because if I dug myself any deeper, who knows how much further things could have escalated? Fortunately, I stumbled upon a movie about this exact thing, 2007’s Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson just before he started his tenure as Nick Fury in the MCU. It has a 17 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Cleaner is not 17 percent bad (Steven Seagal’s Attack Force on the other hand…). Across more than 10,000 ratings on the Popcornmeter, the film has a 40 percent approval rating, and I’m honestly wondering what’s wrong with everybody because this movie, to me, is in the 65 to 70 percent range. It’s a tight thriller about a crime scene cleaner whose most recent job sends him on an investigation that could threaten everything he cares about, and there are enough twists to keep things interesting.
The only real fault I can place on the movie is that it plays like a film that held back because it wanted to appeal to a broader audience. My thought is that since it has an R rating anyway, they should have gone full-on gritty here, but they didn’t.
ASMR For Sick Freaks
Like I said at the top, I fell in love with Cleaner quickly because I like watching people clean things. I also think Samuel L. Jackson can do no wrong. His character, Tom Cutler, is a retired police officer who runs a crime scene cleaning business called Steri-Clean. His job is simple: he shows up at a house when his law enforcement cohorts contact him, gets in his hazmat suit, mixes up his chemicals, and gets to work. The man is exceptionally good at what he does. He can turn your red couch back to white in no time at all, and you can be serving hors d’oeuvres off the same coffee table a dead, bloated body was draped over just hours before, and nobody would be the wiser. He’s that good.
Tom is also a widowed father raising his daughter Rose (Keke Palmer) all by himself. Their relationship is solid, but it gets strained due to the nature of his work and the long hours he has to pull to support her.
Tom becomes suspicious of one of his clients after cleaning Ann Norcut’s (Eva Mendes) house while she was out of town. The job was billed as a homicide cleanup. He enters using the key under the terracotta pot, does his thing, locks up, and goes home. The following day, he realizes he never put the key back, returns to the residence, and is questioned by Ann, who had no idea Steri-Clean did a job at her house. She also points out that her husband, John, is missing. Confiding in his former partner and the godfather of his daughter, Eddie (Ed Harris), Tom learns that John was days away from testifying against the former police commissioner and was probably taken out to prevent him from doing so.
Now, everywhere Tom goes, Eddie seems to be snooping around, as well as Detective Jim Vargas (Luis Guzmán), who’s so straight-faced and serious that he’s either hiding some horrible secret or he’s just as confused about this whole ordeal as Tom is. Tom also knows that he has to tread lightly because of his questionable past involving the man who killed his wife years earlier during a home invasion, and the fate he suffered behind bars while Tom turned a blind eye. Nobody is innocent in the traditional sense in Cleaner, but there’s a clear moral compass to follow once you get to know everybody.
Should Have Gone Harder
My only real beef with Cleaner is that it could have landed so much better as a gritty neo-noir thriller. All the beats and character archetypes are there, but everything feels too surface-level to fully let its hooks sink in. Samuel L. Jackson does an excellent job showcasing his skill set as a tradesman working in a hyperspecific niche industry, and his dynamic with Rose is always believable. He’s a man torn apart by his past traumas, but he shows up for his kid no matter what, even if the day has destroyed any sense of normalcy for him.
Ed Harris and Luis Guzmán do a ton of heavy lifting as morally dubious characters who are either just hard men with resting jerk faces on the right side of the law, or two guys hiding something from Tom as they manipulate their way through the premise. If there’s one thing this movie has going for it, it doesn’t lay all of its cards on the table, and an admirable amount of restraint is used, allowing the mystery to play out in a way that’s ultimately satisfying.
I just wish this one went a little harder, a la True Detective Season 1, instead of playing out like your typical bargain-basement, primed-for-mass-appeal early aughts thriller like The Glass House (2001) or Domestic Disturbance (2001). Fortunately, despite boasting similar production qualities to both of those films, the story itself is worth checking out.
If you’re like me and enjoy watching messes get cleaned up as a form of wish fulfillment (I have kids, sue me), you can stream Cleaner, which is currently streaming on Netflix.
