Cleaner (2007)

Renny Harlin's Cleaner arrives with the grim tidiness of its title. Samuel L. Jackson plays Tom Cutler, a widowed former cop who now sterilizes the aftermath of violence for a living. A wealthy suburban shooting, a key under a potted plant, a missing ledger, a corrupt police commissioner: the machinery clicks along with the solemn efficiency of a man scrubbing a carpet. The film has no interest in telling us how to feel about any of it. It simply wants to know who killed John Norcut.

Which is, in its way, a relief. The cast is more integrated than a 2007 thriller strictly needed to be. Jackson headlines, with Eva Mendes, Keke Palmer, and Luis Guzman in substantial roles, and Ed Harris lurking with the specific menace of a man who owns a nice coat. None of this is presented as an achievement. Race is never mentioned. The wealthy household is a plot location, not a thesis on class. The corrupt officers are corrupt because the script requires them to be, not because the film has absorbed a book about institutional rot. Ann Norcut's miscarriage and affair function as deductions, not as commentary on anything larger.

The final act, in which a child shoots her godfather and a detective promises to burn the evidence, lands somewhere between noir fatalism and narrative exhaustion. There is no sermon waiting at the end. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what we should have learned. It is a minor stain of a movie, as the trades noted, and it fades without leaving a mark on the culture. Some films are products of their moment. This one is merely a product of its budget.