Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Clean’ on VOD, in Which Adrien Brody Gears Up for a Bloody Neo-Noir Thriller

For those of us wondering What Adrien Brody Is Up To These Days, we have Clean – now on VOD – a crime-thriller in which he plays a garbage man named Clean who gets more than his fair share of Taxi Driver voiceovers. Notably, Brody has producer credit, and co-wrote the screenplay with director Paul Solet, their second film together after 2017’s Bullet Head. This new movie might not exist without John Wickamania running amok, as it shares some qualities with that new benchmark for action film; let’s see if it transcends the formula, or even just subverts it a little.

CLEAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Clean drives a trash truck, at night. He tosses a chain over a dumpster and watches as the truck digests the refuse like a lethargic cow gnawing its cud. Sometimes, he plucks a bike frame or antique canister vacuum from the garbage piles, to rehab. During the day, he drives a vintage Monte Carlo painted all matte black, stealthy as shit, stopping to pawn the fixed-up vacuum, or for a haircut, or to deliver a sack lunch to Dianda (Chandler DuPont), a neighborhood girl, maybe 13-ish, he has fatherly feelings for. She lives with her grandmother and doesn’t seem to have much, and he lives alone in a grungy garage where he has nightmares/flashbacks about his daughter, who bears a passing resemblance to Dianda, and doesn’t appear to be around anymore.

Anyway, Clean doesn’t think highly of this world, this city, wherever it is; it resembles a battered old Pennsylvania steel town. He voiceovers in his gruff, sandpapery tone about how it’s a “sea of filth” full of “blight,” and he sounds like Batman and Travis Bickle’s love child. That sure as hell ain’t a psychologically healthy place to be. He drives past a cop who drives past a man on the street getting savagely beaten by a few street thugs and nobody bats an eye. But Clean is nice to the girl, protective in a way that she likely needs, at least a little, and his co-workers and barber and the pawn shop guy (RZA) seem to like and respect him, even if he’s quiet and withdrawn, more than just a bit of a weirdo. There’s something going on beneath the exterior though: “We don’t need anyone to save us,” Dianda’s grandmother says, and Clean replies, “Just tryin’ to save myself.”

Elsewhere in this bullshit town, Mikey (Richie Merritt) gets his ass and his serious failson vibes out of prison. His friends wait for him outside the gate and he hops in their SUV and takes off as his father watches nearby. This doesn’t go over well with Dad, partly because all Mikey’s friends are Black, and the old man isn’t keen on them. See, his pops is his senior, Michael, a local crime boss played by Glenn Fleshler, who, if you didn’t know better, you’d think was the love child of James Gandolfini and Vincent D’Onofrio. Michael’s fish-fry restaurant is his front; in the back, he guts fish and pulls balloons full of dope out of them, and when he’s not doing that, he’s making milquetoast gangsta-wannabe Mikey watch as he guts a human who tried to dick him over. Guess where the body ends up? Yep. In the dumpster, right where Clean can see it. If you assume that nothing goes particularly well from here, you’re pretty much mostly right.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That Monte Carlo is fast – and that shifter-in-the-foreground angle is so, so very Drive. Otherwise, Clean drafts a little on Nobody and digs a little deeper than Wick with a few Taxi Driver and Death Wish-isms.

Performance Worth Watching: Brody really hasn’t been the same since Splice, has he? At least he’s still part of the Wes Anderson stable. The Clean character doesn’t have a lot of meat on its bones, but Brody digs deep to give him just enough of a tortured soul to make us care a little.

Memorable Dialogue: Brody, in (hilarious) voiceover: “Sheep shit cloggin’ up our minds, cloggin’ up the drains, poisoning our water, turnin’ us to shit.”

Sex and Skin: None. TBPWAMFTF: Too Busy Pipe-Wrenching A Mo Fo To F—.

Our Take: Yeah, a pipe wrench. Also, a Craftsman screwdriver and a pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun. Clean gets grim, and grimy, when it proves to not be Pig and kind of becomes what we expected Pig to be, a violent you-f—ed-with-the-wrong-guy revenge slaughterfest. It’s as if Brody’s trying to horn in on Nicolas Cage’s beat here, embracing the B-movie genre-flick vibes, getting low-budget bloody, but with less eye-bulging. I mean, the voiceover stuff is miserable, ridiculously OTT, perhaps an unintentional nudge in the ribs, the dire journaling of a Movie Character fixated on all the ugly things, but not so much that he won’t stop to give a poor kid a lemon chicken breast meal or a rad retro banana-seat stingray bicycle.

But that tenderness – tender as that chicken, assuming it’s been marinated – is balanced by an ugly final sequence full of the requisite highly enjoyable gruesome violence, which is preceded by a middle-act sequence in which some thugs get out their mini-axes that look like ninja gear and… you know. Solet directs with style hither and thither, with noir flourishes and contrived dramatic lighting (enough with the neon-drenched motel rooms already, just close the drapes, ya dummies), which elevate the proceedings above dreck to the realm of the reasonably well-directed. It all comes down to how many times you can sit through the generic story, how many sickening bone-crunching thwacks you can take.

Our Call: I can take a few. Also, Brody’s pretty good, and there’s enough gravelly atmosphere to make you smell the motor oil and gunpowder in the air. STREAM IT, just don’t expect groundbreaking cinema.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.