Silly Hollywood studios. You think if you screen your most putrid movies after our press deadline, we won’t be able to excoriate them. We are not so easily fooled. We see through your clever scheduling schemes. You can run, but you can’t hide.
Code Name: The Cleaner
You know a movie is bad when half way through it you think to yourself, “There better be outtakes!” Cedric the Entertainer is transformed into Cedric the Narrator in this story about a janitor who loses his memory and thinks he’s a spy. I believe “The Cleaner” refers to the fact that theaters housing this movie will be cleaner than others. Lucy Liu (Lucky Number Slevin) and Nicollette Sheridan (Desperate Housewives) co-star as Cedric’s competing love interests but are pimped out like cheap hos in a rap video. It’s as if someone said, “The premise is bad, but the script will make it good.” And then they said, “The script is bad, but Cedric will make it good.” And Cedric said, “I’m just here for my paycheck.” At least there were some good outtakes. PG-13. NATE SMITH.
Happily N’Ever After
Say you’re making a slipshod knockoff of the Shrek franchise that depends on animated gremlins cracking astonishingly unfunny jokes. Say much of your movie’s running time consists of the imps giving slow double-takes after each gag. Wouldn’t it seem a good idea to invest whatever capital you have into making sure those cartoon faces are capable of expression? This insight somehow didn’t occur to first-time director Paul J. Bolger or anyone in the international cadre of Happily N’Ever After producers, who have harnessed the power of computer graphics to create visages on par with those in a mid-‘90s Bond video game. Some of the synthetic effects are understandable (making a cartoon version of Freddie Prinze Jr. is an unenviable task) but shouldn’t the onscreen version of the talking warthog look more lifelike than the one sold in Toys R Us? At any rate, entering Bolger’s Fairy Tale Land means crossing into a laugh-free zone without visual charm. “I hate to tell you this,” Prinze fatuously intones as the villains run amok in some wizard’s castle, “but things get worse.” Much worse. PG. AARON MESH.
Few times, as we wonder this mortal coil, a moment, a shining moment, comes to us and forces us to rethink the nature of man. It sounds like this movie is not one of those moments. Thank you to Nate Smith for such a witty and well put review. At least something redeemable come out of it’s production.
um…i feel like i should say ‘i’m sorry’. i worked on the cleaner. we knew it was bad, but we couldn’t stop it. i feel like a whore but it was work….
Cedric is that you? Hey man, I love your stand up. You’re a great comedian. But man, you weren’t even trying on this one.
(if the person who left the above message (I’m assuming it isn’t actually Cedric) could get a hold of me at nsmith@wweek.com, I’d love to talk to you.)
yup…i didn’t work on the whole show but enough to know it was gonna be bad….