Cleaner

Year 18, Day 153 - 6/2/26 - Movie #5,335

BEFORE: Right now it's the "calm between the storms", since we wrapped on the NewFest Pride event last night and the Tribeca Festival starts in just two days. I was scheduled for four Tribeca shifts but I left myself available in case someone else calls out, and that just happened, so now I'm down for five shifts over the course of a 12-day event. That's fine, I lost two weeks for vacation and then funeral so I need to catch up and make some money. I was planning to see a matinee of "The Mandalorian and Grogu" on June 9, now I'm going to have to delay that a week and try to catch in on June 16. (There's a discount Tuesday program at AMC). It's all good, that's still 2 weeks before I want to post a review. Anyway, this is why I made skip days and why I said that I'd probably need them during the Tribeca Festival. It's going to be THE PLACE for important new films and also some star-studded tributes, so really it's where I want to be working behind the scenes. 

Kalyn Harper carries over from "Playdate".

THE PLOT: Criminal activists hijack a gala, taking 300 hostages. One extremist plans mass murder as a message to the world, but an ex-soldier turned window cleaner works to rescue the hostages. 

AFTER: Yeah, this film kind of puts me in a delicate spot - I want to be nice, I want to give it a good review, but that would mean overlooking a few things. But don't get me wrong, it's great that they're making action films with strong female characters, we've seen the "one-man army" formula applied to Jason Statham again and again, also Liam Neeson, Keanu Reeves, Bruce Willis and more recently, Chris Hemsworth and even Bob Odenkirk. One-WOMAN army films are less common, still there's Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie and Uma Thurman who have given it a go. So now we have Daisy Ridley as an ex-army Special Forces type who must have aged out of the program and taken a job as a window cleaner on a London skyscraper. Well, I guess, I mean who knows more about rappelling down from high places - but a cleaning job? 

There's a bit of wordplay with the title, though because "Cleaner" also could refer to cleaner sources of energy that are being promoted by the corporation that occupies the skyscraper, the Agnian Energy Group, but apparently the company isn't as "clean" as they say they are, because environmental activists infiltrate the company's gala presentation, disguised as an Asian dance group, presumably the evening's entertainment. However they're wearing masks and also are protected from the knockout gas that puts many of the party's guests to sleep, leaving the board members that the activists want to confess the company's sins so they can broadcast them on the internet. It seems the "cleaner" company has been polluting and exploiting Third World countries, while maintaining a separate corporate image. 

Oh, if only there were someone nearby who had not only access to the building's systems, but also the combat knowledge to take these activists down. Thankfully there is, unfortunately she's stuck on a movable scaffold outside the building because her boss made her work late, also she mouthed off to an executive in an elevator, so the boss kind of "stranded" her outside for a bit, and wouldn't you it, the terrorists killed him before he could release his override of the scaffold control. So she can only watch helplessly from outside as the activists subdue the executives and even kill a couple to show they mean business. To make matters worse, her autistic adult brother, who's been kicked out of yet another care home has been put under her supervision, and he's somewhere inside the building with the terrorists, too.

She also JUST found out that one of her co-workers, another window cleaner, is part of the activist group - it's possible that he took the job so he could study the building and learn all the various methods of entry and other holes in the building's security. That tracks but I wonder if I'm helping the screenwriter here by filling in the gaping holes in the plot. It's also a huge drawback that the main action star here is essentially sidelined for a major portion of the film, unable to act or even get back in the building. Imagine if Bruce Willis as John McClane got up into the duct-work of the Nakatomi Tower and got stuck there, and couldn't get out for a large portion of "Die Hard". That's not an action movie, that's an inaction movie. 

The news is not all terrible, because Joey manages to stop the scaffold and burn a flaming "SOS" message on the side of the building. She also gets in contact with the London police SWAT team, so they know that she's not a threat and has the skills to help, once she figures out how to break a window and get back inside. Also, her autistic brother happens to be some kind of hacking genius, of course, he got kicked out of care homes for hacking their files, so if she can reach him, he could be able to plug in and prevent the activist's forced confessions from reaching their audience. But still her ex-co-worker becomes the new leader of the group by assassinating the old leader, and he wants to just kill everyone, he's got a dead-man's switch rigged to his own body so even if he gets killed, the building could still blow up real good. 

But if anyone's got the skills to fix everything, it's this former army agent turned window cleaner, right? Why, it's almost like some screenwriter thought about a typical day in the life of someone doing this very typical job and tried to imagine all of the things that could possibly go wrong...

Directed by Martin Campbell (director of "Memory" and "The Protégé")

Also starring Daisy Ridley (last seen in "Ophelia"), Matthew Tuck, Clive Owen (last seen in "Killer Elite"), Taz Skylar, Flavia Watson, Ruth Gemmell, Ray Fearon (last seen in "Memory"), Lee Boardman (ditto), Howard Charles, Rufus Jones (last seen in "Wonka"), Richard Hope, Gavin Fleming, Poppy Townsend White, Dudley Watts, Calvin Warrington-Heasman, Andreea Diac (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker"), Russell De Rozario (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Kate Nichols (also last seen in "Memory"), Stella Stocker (ditto), Sol E. Romero (ditto), Celine Arden, Melissa Humler, Ben Essex, Rebecca Bellavia, Tom Boney, David Cheung, Joshua Ravenscroft, Melanie Grey, Regina Seifert, Akie Kotabe (last seen in "The Son"), Lorna Lowe, Cassandra Spiteri, Simon Uttley, Atanas Srebrev (last seen in "Mechanic: Resurrection"), Einar Haraldsson.

RATING: 5 out of 10 "bird strikes"

Playdate

Year 18, Day 152 - 6/1/26 - Movie #5,334

BEFORE: Alan Tudyk carries over from "The Twits". And here are the actor links that should get me through June, past Father's Day and all the way to the Doc Block: Kalyn Harper, Poppy Townsend White, Kyle Chandler, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Keanu Reeves, Sandra Oh, Frankie Muniz, Anna Chancellor, Saoirse Ronan, Tamara Lawrence, WIllem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Sally Messham, John Sessions, Helen Mirren, Liev Schreiber, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Sigourney Weaver. You know, because we're looking at a month where there's room for John Wick and Cody Banks and William Shakespeare and Golda Meir and then Grogu somehow. It sounds weird, maybe the Doc Block just can't get here enough...

THE PLOT: Brian has been fired from his job and becomes a stay-at-home dad. He accepts a playdate invitation from another stay-at-home dad who turns out to be a loose cannon. 

AFTER: I was going to watch this film earlier in the year, but now I can't remember if that was going to be between two Isla Fisher movies or two films with Paul Walter Hauser. It hardly matters, the important point is that I dropped it, probably from the middle of someone's three-movie mini-chain, because it kind of felt like a Father's Day film, maybe. But I couldn't be sure that I could get back to it near Father's Day, that sort of thing is rather unpredictable - however a lot of the actor's names were coded in blue or green on my list, and that means there are connections. So I figured I had a pretty good shot at circling back to it, and OK, looks like I was right. I delayed this just a couple of days to get it into June - which thematically is for dads and grads, and I've probably got more of the former than the latter. If I can stay on track there will be two notable recent father-centric films on the holiday weekend itself, and other father-related plot points will be considered a bonus. 

But it's funny how it feels like as soon as it's not a theme month and I've got the chance to go anywhere and watch a movie about any topic, I get pulled right back into spy or heist or other action films. "Cleanskin", "Black Bag", "My Spy: The Eternal City", "Heads of State", "Deep Cover", "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre", "Killer Elite", "Homefront", "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning", "G20" and so on - the only reason May wasn't packed with action films was probably due to me taking half of the month off. But it's June and I'm back on the topic - today's film isn't technically about spies, but instead normal dads caught up in a weird military industrial/government (?) affair, but it still kind of counts as intrigue of a sort. More spy and assassin-based films are on the way, like "Back in Action" and that John Wick spin-off film. 

Everything here starts with a very simple premise, what if a normal man lost his job and his wife went back to work, and he just became a stay-at-home dad for a while, and got a chance to bond with his stepson? I mean, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there? Well, that's the screenwriter's job, to think of a very basic plot and then come up with a whole lot of different ways that it can go wrong, because there's a movie in every simple story if you just make it all go sideways or tits-up. Brian is convinced that sports is the answer to bonding with young Lucas, they just have to find the right sport. But Brian's coaching of the lacrosse team and putting Lucas in the game in a clutch moment (that's probably a conflict of interest) is ruined when he describes the come-from-behind pivotal turning point of the game as if it's occurring in slow-motion, and Lucas takes him literally and tries to slow-motion walk toward the goal, and turns out to be a terrible idea. Lucas gets tackled by the other team and then roughed up again later by his own teammates. 

So they go out on a different day and toss the old football around - right next to another father/son pair doing the same thing on the same day. Lucas kind of bonds with CJ, the other boy, and before you know it, they're invited by Jeff, the other dad, to come over for a playdate and then eat pizza at Buckee Cheese (possibly a ficitonal mash-up of the famous pizza restaurant for kids with the also-popular Buckee's rest stops, seen across the U.S. southern states). Suddenly a group of mercenaries attacks the restaurant, and they want to end this little male bonding fest. After a fight involving both the mercs and the restaurant's mascots, the foursome escape in a stolen minivan and are further pursued in a high-speed chase with explosions and everything. 

Jeff is forced to reveal that he is an ex-Delta Force soldier, who after his discharge was forced to take security guard work at a top-secret facility and discovered CJ being held prisoner there, so he broke him out and they've been hiding out ever since. Now that armed mercenaries have found them, they're forced to all hide out at Jeff's estranged father's house - they can't really stay there, but they do put a plan together to return to the mystery facility and kidnap an employee in order to determine what exactly is taking place there. 

There is a bunch of cool stuff in this film, in addition to the action, some of which I haven't seen before - there's a whole army of cloned teen soldiers-in-training, and honestly I haven't seen that as a plot-point since "Star Wars: Episode II". (It's funny, I was just going through old photos last week and I found some from my first year of autograph collecting, which included meeting Daniel Logan at SDCC, probably in 2003). Of course, we don't KNOW about the clone army at the start of this film, it's something that comes up later. All we know is that the scientists harvested Jeff's DNA because he's a perfect physical specimen, only the clones are emotionless and have no morals, therefore no hesitation about killing and no PTSD later on. Jeff's former commander teamed up with an eccentric billionaire scientist to perfect the cloning technique and attempt to create a new perfect and replaceable army. 

The billionaire and his henchmen threaten to harm Brian's wife, so he leads Jeff into a trap, where young CJ is taken from him and returned to the facility he came from. But this allows the other characters to enact a rescue mission thanks to the accidental transfer of Lucas's tracking device to CJ when he loans him his jacket. When in doubt, just steal another gray minivan, crash it into whatever building you need to get into, and with luck you'll also run over the villain at the same time. Well, it's not the worst philosophy to live by...

Directed by Luke Greenfield (director of "The Girl Next Door" and "Something Borrowed")

Also starring Kevin James (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Alan Ritchson (last seen in "Ordinary Angels"), Sarah Chalke (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Big Miracle"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Jay Kelly"), Benjamin Pajak, Banks Pierce, Hiro Kanagawa (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Miles Fisher (last seen in "Dean"), Luke Greenfield (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Paul Walter Hauser (last seen in "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere"), Lauren Akemi Bradley, Sarah Surh (last seen in "Colossal"), Sabrina Dhowre Elba (last seen in "Three Thousand Years of Longing"), Massiel Taveras, Kalyn Harper, Peter New (last seen in "Monster Trucks"), Kiefer O'Reilly (last seen in "Rememory"), Benjamin Goas, AJ Kostynick, Elenna Anastacio, Jason William Day (last seen in "The Smashing Machine"), Kian Pitman, Patti Gervan, Chase Nicholson, Beth Greenfield, Tess Atkins, Madie Vredegoor (last seen in "Cut Bank"), Aron Cihelka, Pedram Younesi, Chase Petriw, Sarah Hayward (last seen in "Miracle"), Francisca Dennis, 

with archive footage of Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Ice Cube, Emile Hirsch (last seen in "The Comeback Trail") and Zach Galifianakis (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 Kings Hawaiian rolls

The Twits

Year 18, Day 151 - 5/31/26 - Movie #5,333

BEFORE: OK, today is the LAST day of May so I've got one final film for the month, then I'm on to Father's Day material, I think. It's 21 days away, sure, so let's see how many father-based films the chain has picked for me, I know it's at least three, but fathers kind of turn up everywhere, and sometimes when you least expect them to. I've got 19 films to watch in those 21 days, so I still have two skip days available to me, I will try to get through the first week of June without burning one, as I may be busiest during the second week of the month. Again, I'll keep an eye on actor birthdays to see if that gives me any more insight over lining up the films with the calendar. The secondary goal is to review "The Mandalorian & Grogu" before the end of next month. 

I've only watched 16 movies in May, here's the format breakdown: 

MAY

6 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Gridiron Gang, The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, Jules, Big Miracle, Bad Moms

4 watched on Netflix: Spiderhead, Wake Up Dead Man, Matilda: The Musical, The Twits

2 watched on Hulu: Thelma, Lee

2 watched on Disney+: Zootopia 2, Honey We Shrunk Ourselves!

2 watched on Peacock: Wicked, Wicked: For Good

16 TOTAL

Dee Bradley Baker carries over from "Wicked: For Good", where he voiced Chistery, the leader of the Flying Monkeys. 

THE PLOT: Two orphans join forces with a family of magical animals to save their city from the powerful Mr. and Mrs. Twit - the meanest, smelliest, nastiest people in the world. 

AFTER: Just my luck, this is another film based on a Roald (Ronald, really) Dahl book - a beloved children's classic that, much like his other books, was extremely weird and out there and blew people's minds back before the Reagan era. Apparently he wrote the whole book just to prove that people with beards are nasty. Well, he wasn't wrong. Dahl was also very adamant about nobody, ever, EVER changing anything about his book "The Twits", but still in 2023 Penguin Books went in and changed a whole bunch of passages because, well, some ideas and some themes in the book were not crucial to the main story. Also kids were deemed unworthy of learning about foot warts and men keeping bits of their breakfast in their beards so they could have a snack later. 

Then the film company changed a BUNCH more things apparently, and again, Roald Dahl insisted that nobody ever change his written words, so they changed a bunch of his IDEAS when they made the movie. A-HA, he never forbid that at all, so let's all take advantage of the dead author thanks to a technicality.  

The Twits are a horrible married couple, who hate everyone and also each other - they are retired circus monkey trainers, and they want to open up their own theme park, called Twitlandia. They constantly prank each other by hiding worms in plates of spaghetti, and they also keep a live toad in their bed. If you lick the toes of the toad, your personality becomes "opposite" of what it was before, remember that because it could be important later. The Twits also use a very sticky glue called "Hugtight" to catch birds to Mrs. Twit can bake them into pies - and when we first see them in this film, they're stealing a giant truck filled with liquid hot dog meat, and they fill the town watertower with that, until it explodes and fills the town with stinky liquid meat by-products. 

The Twits also keep a family of magical animals called Muggle-Wumps captive, in the book it's because they want to create a circus act of upside-down monkeys, but in the film the monkeys are kept standing on their heads because that makes them cry, and their tears power the electrical supply to the Twitlandia Park somehow. The movie adds a couple of kids who live at a city orphanage, who want to both solve the mystery of who filled the water tower with hot dog meat (which was done in revenge for their team park being shut down after MANY health and safety violations) but also they want to free the Muggle-Wumps once they learn about them.  And because these two kids, Beesha and Busby, are filled with childlike compassion, they can understand what the Muggle-Wumps are saying.

The Twits get arrested because Beesha recorded them with her body-cam, admitting to their hot dog meat-related crime. However they are soon bailed out by a family who want the town to be fun again, like it was in times past, and the Twits also promised everyone a million dollars if they can be allowed to re-open their park and charge admission again. The Twits go right to the orphanage and try to get their Muggle-Wumps back, first by promising to "adapt" orphaned Beesha, then by threats. But as we learned in "Matilda", Mr. Dahl believed that it's OK for kids to be nasty to adults if the adults are nasty to them first - so the orphans trick the Twits into jumping out the window. 

The Twits then feel the only way they will get their park open and the Muggle-Wumps back is to run for mayor in the upcoming election, and they do this by feeding the current mayor, Wayne John Jon-Jon, a cake made with laxatives, which causes his butt to explode. Classy. Beesha tries to crash the election, but it's too late, the Twits have promised everyone in the town money and success and so much winning that they may all get TIRED of winning (sound familiar?) so the Twits become co-mayors of the town, and they are now free to steal their animals back and also tear down the orphanage in revenge, or at least move it to someplace very inconvenient. 

During their first performance at the re-opened Twitlandia Park, Beesha manages to get both Twits to lick the Sweet Toed Toad's toes, so they immediately become their opposites, a pair of decent-minded people who let captive animals loose and apologize for their misdeeds by blowing up all of their amusement park rides. But even this is not enough revenge for Beesha (she's such a Matilda, really...) so she pranks the Twits by rearranging their living room furniture on the ceiling, as if the room is upside down. The stupid Twits then determine that they are, in fact, standing on the ceiling and not the floor, and they need to stand on their heads to correct things. Well, that would be the first time blood made it to their brains, at least - and when they stand on their heads, they find that they are glued to the floor thanks to that very strong glue they used before to trap birds. 

The orphans celebrate, they have finally defeated the Twits and saved the Muggle-Wumps, however now that they have enacted vengeance on the Twits, their childhood innocence is GONE and they can no longer understand what the animals are saying. Well, karma is a bitch, isn't it? So they decide to SAVE the Twits, who are in danger of dying from the "Dreaded Shrinks", which is what happens when you stand on your head for too long, your neck shrinks into your head, your legs shrink into your body, and eventually you disappear by collapsing into your own body. 

Oh, I forgot to mention that the entire story is told by Pippa, a female firefly, to her infant son as a bedtime story, near the end when the Twits fly off because of a helium balloon prank, Pippa and her son can be seen flying out of Mr. Twit's beard, which is where they've been the whole time.  Umm, sure. The orphanage is returned to its original location, and the town is a FUN capital destination again, because the Muggle-Wumps vomit out these little florbnorble characters when they get anxious, and they've been so very anxious lately.  Apparently the florbnorbles are lots of fun when you have so many of them.  And the Twits end up in Loompaland (where the Oompa Loompas come from, I'd wager) and get eaten by a gigantic Sweet-Toed Toad.  That seems about right. 

This is the best sort of story to tell with an animated film - a lot of the stuff that happens here would be IMPOSSIBLE to film in live-action. So sure, make it into an animated film, however it's still quite a lot of silly things happening, and the narrative is bound to pale by comparison to other films that aren't packed up with wall-to-wall nonsense as this is. 

Directed by Todd Demong, Phil Johnston (director of "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Katie Shanahan

Also starring Johnny Vegas (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Margo Martindale (last heard in "Stop-Loss"), Emilia Clarke (last seen in "Dom Hemingway"), Sami Amber, Alan Tudyk (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Ryan Anderson Lopez, Phil Johnston (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Jason Mantzoukas (last heard in "Dolittle"), Riley King, Zarah Kulczycki, Rebecca Wisocky (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Mark Proksch (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Della Saba (last heard in "Wish"), Nicole Byer (last seen in "Thelma"), Charlie Berens, Stephanie Escajeda, Natalie Portman (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Draft Day"), Israa Zainab, Erika Dapkewicz, David Byrne (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Scott Whyte (last heard in "Tom & Jerry"), David Cowgill, Hayley Williams,

RATING: 4 out of 10 news updates from Beverly Onion