Code Name: The Cleaner: Critic Reviews

Get Lucy Liu better roles!

Cedric the Entertainer's artless performance deadens what could have been a much funnier comedy.

If you like comedies but hate going to the trouble of actually laughing, then this might just be the movie you've been waiting for.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner, not the putative comedy nor the action, which kicks in only at the end.

It's Memento for dummies. But to this movie's credit, I couldn't follow it, either.

How do films this stale and generic continue to get made, let alone with topflight talent? Cedric has been stealing scenes from bigger names for nearly a decade; he deserves better than a few amusingly-improvised minutes at the end of his own movie.

There's some pretty good improvised shtick from DeRay Davis as a wacky janitor. But these are small pleasures in a movie that never really generates any serious laughs.

There are better action scenes in marionette shows.

Cedric the Entertainer, whose standup comedy act is utterly endearing, is hung out to dry in this feeble spy comedy. It is not only pitched at 12-year-olds, it was apparently made by them.

January is usually not the time to expect much high art among new releases, but this is an especially limp star vehicle.

The story keeps stopping dead to deliver product placement for Jake's favorite brands of junk food. There must be a better way to work Skittles into the script than to have Jake keep saying things like, 'I love Skittles.'

Cedric the Entertainer is never going to be Cedric the Leading Man.

From past experience, viewers know that Cedric the Entertainer can be very funny. While there are times when Code Name: The Cleaner highlights his comedic abilities, there aren't enough of them.

This implausible plot full of holes does pave the way for a series of Cedric the Entertainer skits and physical gags. None of these is very funny. A few are painfully unfunny.

Except for a couple of Cedric's ad-libs, which are funnier in the closing-credit outtakes than in the movie itself, the whole thing is just lame and inane.

Code Name: The Cleaner offers no surprises but is good-natured and funny.

The Entertainer conjures up some charm, and DeRay Davis provides pyrotechnics as a janitor/wanna-be rapper, but like the teddy-clad bubble-bath square-off between Liu and Sheridan, it's just not enough.

Depressingly laugh-free comedy that's so irredeemably awful that you'll wonder why Martin Lawrence isn't in it.

The one laugh is in the production notes, where director Les Mayfield claims this is a comic take on the Jason Bourne movies. As if.

The sooner Code Name... gets flushed out of cinemas, the better.

A prime candidate for Worst Movie Of 2007.

Although comprised of lowest-common denominator gags, it's an oddly hard-to-follow affair, with good and bad FBI agents popping up everywhere and the plot only revealing itself in fits and starts.

Do anything: rob a petrol station, superglue your eyelids together, chew on broken glass, just avoid at all costs.