Mark Reviews Movies: CLEAN (2022)

Clean, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 27, 2022

Not every actor needs to become a glum action hero, but a good number of them appear to want to try to be. Clean gives Adrien Brody that opportunity, playing the eponymous (if that's even his real name—which, hopefully, it isn't) trash collector with a dark and mysterious past, which has turned him into a gloomy and enigmatic person. There's nothing about the man, his past, or the inevitable turns of this plot that will come as a surprise, since the screenplay, written by Brody and director Paul Solet, follows a template that's pretty well-established now.

Our man Clean (seriously) collects garbage (again, seriously) by night and tries to keep his demons at bay by day. The guy has a good heart, which is made apparent by assorted deeds of kindness—such as feeding a junkyard dog and painting over the graffiti covering abandoned houses in the neighborhood. Of particular note, Clean prepares lunch every day for Dianda (Chandler Ari DuPont), a local teen whose parents died in an unspecified accident, who is being raised by her grandmother Ethel (Michelle Wilson), and who repeatedly becomes a damsel in distress for our hero to rescue.

As for the demons, those are vaguely revealed by way of flashbacks: vignettes of Clean with his daughter (played by Victory Brinker) and flashes of the character exacting bloody punishment on anonymous goons with various weapons. He's "the guy with the wrench," as one man from the neighborhood eventually—and too late—realizes.

Who was this man, and how and why did he come to deal in violence? It's not entirely clear. The violence comes before and/or after a certain tragedy in the past, and it was either his profession or retaliation for said tragedy—or both, for all the movie explains. That isn't much, apart from a throwaway line near the end about Clean being a notorious and feared guy from Chicago. The story just needs the character to have the hidden capacity for violence and a reason to have stopped it at one point.

Clean treats his violent tendencies as an addiction of sorts, complementary to his kicked addiction to heroin. His sponsor (played by Mykelti Williamson), a local barber, either knows the full extent of Clean's past or speaks in such broadly generic terms that his dialogue could be referring to the drugs, the tragedy, Clean's penchant for violence, or all of those things.

The lack of specificity here is both intentional, since the man's past—as predictable as it may be—is the key to the mystery surrounding him, and frustrating, since that past is more a plot point than any kind of significant characterization. The point isn't whom he was and is now. It is, though, what Clean will do, if provided with a threat against him or the people about whom he cares.

The threat comes in the person of Michael (Glenn Fleshler), a local crime lord who runs his illegal drug operation out of the fish shop that has been in his family for generations (Like the hero's job, the villain's seems assigned for the oddity of how uncharacteristic it is for a hardened killer). The movie tries to make him a contradiction of sorts, in that he's religious, attending a church service and donating money—just before walking to his shop next door and beating a man to death in slow motion, while solemn organ music blares on the soundtrack. The absence of any nuance to the contradictory nature of these two things simply makes the villain as much an empty cliché as our hero—only on the opposite end of the moral spectrum.

Michael's only son Mikey (Richie Merritt) has just been released from prison. While the father wants the son to learn the ropes of the family's legitimate and illegal businesses, Mikey just wants to hang out, do drugs, and cause trouble with members of a local gang. Clean gets on the gang's wrong side, and later, they get on his bad side, which causes an inevitable clash between the hero and the villain.

The plot, characters, and general atmosphere of all of this are wholly routine, especially shallow, and entirely obvious. Solet gives the story and the character plenty of room and time to breathe, which only emphasizes how little there is to both.

Brody is certainly and appropriately brooding in a role that mostly requires him to brood before, during, and after the delayed onslaught of violence. When it does arrive, the action of Clean—featuring hatchets, plenty of firearms, and Clean's signature wrench—is staged in such a haphazard way that at least it matches the rest of the narrative.

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