Clean
IFCThe post-Academy Awards career of Adrien Brody has been anything but what the title of his latest action romp would suggest. Ten years ago, Clean would have been a straight-to-DVD fixture. A firm staple of the bargain bin hidden away beneath piles of unwanted clothing and cheap candles. Those days are over, and now studios can silently release these action-packed slogs onto any streaming platform that will take them. But Clean feels different. It feels far closer to Brody than first expected. He writes, produces, and stars in what feels more like a passion project than a paycheck one. Considering the deluge of Bruce Willis-featuring, featureless action movies, it is a refreshing and briefly inspiring time for Clean, a film catering to Brody’s leading role as a garbage collector.
But the eponymous character, played by Brody, is the divine and sickened man with the righteous plan. Narration that calls its character “stained” and “dirty” never quite clicks, primarily because it is dictated without an ounce of irony. Building up Clean as an inevitably hopeless antonym to his name is rather easy when director Paul Solet rattles through the usual suspects of narrative development. A scrawny dog for a companion, a sense of underlining failure to highlight the downtrodden route of a character who eats dog food yet can afford his own vehicle, and home. The traumatic flashbacks, with gore and explosions, look more like they’re part of a football hooligan film from the early 2000s than something the character can reflect on when he inevitably ends up on that violent road again. Clean fails to bring itself together at the most crucial of times.
Thick and grim pulpy atmospheres and their dingy recollections make Clean a film that fails to move away from how smug and smart it feels its clash of title and setting should be. Solet is rigid in this use. Brody and the accompanying characters are playing ball, though. They are game for whatever action-packed nonsense is thrown at them. Brody writes his way into a corner, though. He hopes to make his character tough but loved, feared and respected. That is such a difficult blur to maintain and not at all one that comes across too frequently for Clean. The gory action scenes are fairly uneventful and unconvincing, most taking place in narrow corridors and featuring pathetic gore effects and poor fight scenes.
Clean is, well, not as cleanly cut as it should be. It has the respectable, independent qualities that cater to the archetype Brody wishes to project, but little more than that. A shame, since Brody is trying his hardest to pool it all together and take it to that next level. Where Clean can try and paper over those troubles of ill-fated action and poor-quality characteristics, it will never quite manage to do so. Brody tries and fails to make an action that blends the dramatics needed to give his eponymous character that extra boost. That rise to the next level. He fails to cement that independent legacy that Nicolas Cage or Liam Neeson has managed time and time again. Hard luck, but Brody must learn that he cannot write a script that feeds his character and nobody around him.