3 ½ stars
While working a particularly gruesome job, a crime scene clean-up crew discovers a bag full of cash crammed up a chimney. After some debate, they decide to keep the money, divide it up, and start leading the lives they were meant to have. However, the owner of the money has a different plan for the cash and the cleaning crew.
People finding a bag of illegal money the mob wants back is a basic plot for a crime genre movie. Still, director John Keeyes (Cult Killer) and screenwriter Matthew Rogers (The Survivalists) enjoy taking that baseline and building a wildly entertaining film that’s a springboard for the cast to reach new heights in scenery chewing. That’s a compliment, too, because many actors reading the same dialogue in this movie in conventional comedy/caper ways would make The Clean Up Crew a snoozefest. That’s not the case with the cast Keeyes put together.
The film stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Alex, the leader (in his mind) of the crew, which includes his fiance, Meagan (Ekaterina Baker), his actual boss, Siobhan (Melissa Leo), and her drug-addled son, Chuck (Swen Temmel). They all do a fantastic job establishing their characters in their first scene, then spend 90 minutes defying all expectations of who they are. Temmel goes through the most significant change as Chuck stops taking drugs long enough to let his impressive and deadly life skills come out to play. The fact that he is utterly convincing in both extremes is a testament to Temmel’s talent. Leo’s character has her kind of transformation in the movie, too, going from a hard-ass boss to a caring mother of the others. She plays both parts well, although one can’t help but say that it would have been much better if she hadn’t used that too-broad Irish accent she’d come up with for the part.
Rhys Meyers, best known for his more serious leading man roles in Match Point and The Children of Huang Shi, creates in Alex the personification of an over-caffeinated dachshund, a jittery mix of anxiety and determination, bravery and cowardice. Watching his inner turmoil of fears and conflicts play across Rhys Meyers’ face as he forces himself to do things he’d never imagined doing, like killing someone in cold blood, is fascinating. And a lot of fun. The fact that Alex dreams of becoming a professional MMA fighter underscores everything he does and fails to do. Baker (The Card Counter) has the unenviable task of being the eye in the hurricane that is life with her fiance before and after the bag of money raises the stakes. Meagan could have been more shrewish and far less effectively played. Baker is calmer in her approach to the chaos, which perfectly sets the audience up for the moment she reveals there’s more to Meagan than they imagined.
As great as the ‘good guys’ are in The Clean Up Crew, Antonio Banderas is Gabriel, the bad guy who wants his money back, and this is the pinnacle performance of the film. Like Rhys Meyers, Banderas is perhaps better known for his more serious roles in movies like Pain and Glory and Philadelphia, but let’s not forget that he is also the voice of Puss in Boots from The Shrek movies and its many spin-offs, so he knows how to deliver a comic line. He is also a skilled physical comedian who uses his hands and body to huge comic effect. They could add some DVD extras of his scenes with the dialogue taken out, and it would be almost as funny.
