“Cheap Guy Ritchie copy” doesn’t sound like a particularly promising premise for a film. The plot – a crime scene cleanup crew discovers a suitcase full of money that is intended as a bribe from a crime syndicate to the police – doesn’t seem particularly promising either. And yet director Jon Keeyes manages to The cleanup crew into a delightful and wonderfully strange parody of a gangster film.
Keeyes is helped enormously by his cast, all of whom engage in fierce competition to see who can cram the biggest pieces of scenery into their mouths on a standstill. Antonio Banderas as the Machiavelli-quoting, ridiculously mustachioed crime boss Gabriel quickly takes the lead. But Swen Temmel as Chuck – a drug-addicted, semi-unconscious cleaner with an unexpected past as some kind of ninja-assassin-war-criminal – isn’t far behind. A slum-dwelling Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Melissa Leo seem to be having the time of their lives, slipping the word “fuck” into every other line. Ekaterina Baker as Meagan, another cleaner who dreams of running a funeral home (?), spends the entire film in a carefree pout – even as she’s about to be shot in the head.
Keeyes’ genius is in taking Ritchie’s hip camera cuts, profanely hip dialogue and hip split-screen shenanigans and treating them all as if they weren’t hip at all, but mere camp mishaps. The film quickly abandons any pretense of verisimilitude, instead seeking out increasingly improbable one-liners (“You kicked me in the fucking knee and then tried to kill me with a fucking sword!”), wild grimaces and appealingly cheesy fight choreography. The hints of a possible sequel at the end are surely part of the joke. If there is somehow a The cleanup crew part 2But I will definitely watch it. R, 95 minutes.
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