The Clean Up Crew

          Over the last twenty-five years, Guy Ritchie seems to have a hold on a certain type of movie. I for one, love Guy Ritchie’s crime movies for the most part, so getting those vibes from The Clean Up Crew kind of had me excited. The setup is pretty simple: a group of people find a case full of money that would change their lives. Of course, there’s no such thing as free money, but while it might give off the vibes of a Guy Ritchie movie, after watching it, I really feel like The Clean Up Crew might have catfished me.

The money mentioned above did have an owner, and it is Gabriel (Antonio Banderas), a kingpin who uses that money to pay off the people he needs to in order to do his business. At the drop, things go bad, and people get shot, leaving a mess that needs to be cleaned up. That’s where the Good Life Cleaners come into play. Led by Siobhan (Melissa Leo), the group consists of Chuck (Swen Temmel), Meagan (Ekaterina Baker), and Alex (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), the latter two also being a couple. During the cleaning, one of them finds a suitcase stuffed up the chimney, which happens to contain a lot of money. As they gush over what they’ve found, a man who was involved in the earlier shootout returns for the money, which leads to the cleaning crew capturing him for information. The plan is to go up the ladder and eliminate anyone who will come looking for this money, while also trying to stay off the gangster radar. The stakes are raised when Meagan is captured, setting up the eventual big boss fight between Gabriel and the cleaners.

Written by Matthew Rodgers, The Clean Up Crew bypasses trying to build suspense, instead hoping its cast of characters will carry the story. All of these characters, of course, compete for screen time as they try to balance the crime issues with their personal needs. The dialogue tries to be both dark and cheeky, but it doesn’t provide any interactions that are particularly memorable. When you add the often student-film feeling you get from director Jon Keeyes—since the film clearly spent its budget on the cast, leaving very little for the actual production—this only adds to the sense of a missed opportunity.

For a film that is labeled a “thriller”, The Clean Up Crew is severely lacking in the thrills department. There are a few things that do work—the premise is one of them—but the end product feels more like more a few known movies just spliced together. Banderas is also fun, as he seems to be having the time of his life playing Gabriel; unfortunately, that enthusiasm doesn’t translate to the audience, leaving me saying to myself, “I’ll have what he’s having.” As for everything else, The Clean Up Crew  never lands on what it wants to be, treating most of the violence as if it were something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. When you add that to an editing style that gets old quickly, everything just ends up being a not-so-good time and a movie that has little going for it.