Code Name: The Cleaner (2007)

Critic Reviews

• J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader

  There's some pretty good improvised shtick from DeRay Davis as a wacky janitor. But these are small pleasures in a movie that never really generates any serious laughs.

• Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly

  Get Lucy Liu better roles!

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  How do films this stale and generic continue to get made, let alone with topflight talent? Cedric has been stealing scenes from bigger names for nearly a decade; he deserves better than a few amusingly-improvised minutes at the end of his own movie.

• Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

  Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner, not the putative comedy nor the action, which kicks in only at the end.

• Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle

  The good news is, Cedric can make even eating Skittles sort of funny -- and he easily saves this movie from being a wreck.

• Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

  Nicollette Sheridan, playing a femme fatale, is all hard body and desperate cheekbones; you just want to give the poor woman a malted, and some acting lessons.

• Joshua Starnes, ComingSoon.net

  Code Name: The Cleaner isn't the worse comedy ever made; it probably won't even be the worst of 2007. For the most part it's simply boring, with fleeting patches of ineptness.

• Tom Meek, Boston Phoenix

  The Entertainer conjures up some charm, and DeRay Davis provides pyrotechnics as a janitor/wanna-be rapper, but like the teddy-clad bubble-bath square-off between Liu and Sheridan, it's just not enough.

• Cynthia Fuchs, Common Sense Media

  Amnesia action-comedy might hurt your brain, too.

• Matthew Turner, ViewLondon

  Depressingly laugh-free comedy that's so irredeemably awful that you'll wonder why Martin Lawrence isn't in it.

• David Gritten, Independent

  The one laugh is in the production notes, where director Les Mayfield claims this is a comic take on the Jason Bourne movies. As if.

• Phelim O'Neill, Guardian [UK]

  If you like comedies but hate going to the trouble of actually laughing, then this might just be the movie you've been waiting for.

• , Daily Mirror [UK]

  Although comprised of lowest-common denominator gags, it's an oddly hard-to-follow affair, with good and bad FBI agents popping up everywhere and the plot only revealing itself in fits and starts.

• Catherine Chambers, BBC

  The sooner Code Name... gets flushed out of cinemas, the better.

• Ken McIntyre, Total Film

  where the number-one superguy used to solve crazy mix-ups like this in 15 minutes, The Cleaner takes a laboured, exposition-larded hour and a half.

• David Jenkins, Time Out

  Do anything: rob a petrol station, superglue your eyelids together, chew on broken glass, just avoid at all costs.

• Rob Daniel, Sky Movies

  Code Name: The Cleaner is one of the year's big stinkers.

• Ross Bennett, Empire Magazine

  A prime candidate for Worst Movie Of 2007.

• Anton Bitel, Film4

  too clumsy to be the sophisticated parody of memory-loss films it might have been, too bland for its action sequences to kick any ass, too dumbed-down to make much out of the clashes of race, class and gender at the heart of its fish-out-of-water comedy

• Scott Collura, IGN Movies

  If Cedric the Entertainer's constant mugging for the camera is not your cup of tea, and a derivative plot, relatively humorless script, and mundane directing aren't up your alley, then best to clean Code Name: The Cleaner off your must-see list right now.

Read all 24 critic reviews