BEFORE: Starting the week with a double-feature for Samuel L. Jackson, two relatively short films today will help me get to all of his films on my list and still make Mother's Day on time.
THE PLOT: A former cop who now works as a crime scene cleaner unknowingly participates in a cover-up.
AFTER: This one's got a pretty good hook, after a professional cleaner finishes work on a crime scene, the paperwork disappears at the police station, there's a man missing and his wife seems to have no idea that anything ever happened in her house. Tom Cutler is THAT good at his job, there's no trace left of the blood that was all over the couch, and the walls, and the floor - and his ex-cop mind immediately tips him off that something's not right, he got tricked in to cleaning up another cop's personal business as if it were the end of an investigation, not the erasure of one. The problem then becomes, even though there's no trace of bodily fluids, there's going to be traces of cleaning fluids, and each cleaner uses a different mixture. So unless he figures out what's going on, he could become a suspect. Ha, but that would only happen if police were interested in solving crimes, what are the chances of that happening?
This all then becomes about the WHY somebody wanted this man, and his bloodstains, to disappear. There's also a great demonstration on how to do a deep-clean on a leather couch, but if cleaning up blood on this level is important to you, you've probably got bigger concerns. Anyway, it's not really about the cleaning, thanks to movie magic, they probably just shot the clean scenes first before spreading around the fake blood, and just edited that footage into the later parts of the film. Could you ever be comfortable in your living room again, after a crime scene got cleaned up there? And how do you patch up a 2-foot by 4-foot square hole in the carpet?
The WHO is important, sure, but there aren't that many characters in this film, so very few places for the culprit to hide. Forget the artifice, it's probably going to turn out to be the guy you think it's going to be, but WHY? I watched until the end, and I still can't quite determine that.
Along the way, Tom's got to try to re-connect with his daughter - they've been trying to hold things together since the violent death of Tom's wife, which his daughter witnessed. A school project on her mother is a chance for her to go through a literal box of memories, and doing so brings her closer to her mother's memory but also pushes her away from her father at the same time. This family stuff was handled much more artfully than the police corruption investigation, that's for sure. I'm still not sure which policemen, if any, were working to solve the missing persons case - and how everything related to that ledger.
Also starring Ed Harris (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Keke Palmer (last seen in "Hustlers"), Eva Mendes (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Luis Guzman (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Maggie Lawson (last seen in "Still Waiting..."), Jose Pablo Cantillo, Robert Forster (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Edrick Browne (last seen in "Manglehorn"), Marc Macaulay (last seen in "Matinee"), Peter Franzen, Rosalind Rubin, Mike Guy, Richard Folmer, James Barnes, Linda Leonard, Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Patrick Kirton, Peyton Wetzel, with archive footage of Cary Grant (last seen in "Topper"), Katharine Hepburn (last seen in "Holiday")
RATING: 5 out of 10 soccer trophies
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