Paul Solet’s Clean adopts a funereal air right out of the gate, but its story falls right in line with action schlock like The Equalizer. Adrien Brody plays Clean, an enigmatic garbageman trying to live a quiet life in Utica, New York. His backstory isn’t explicitly stated, but it’s clear from the quick-cut flashes of memory that pierce through his sleepless nights that he’s left behind a world of violence, and that the past is about to catch up with him.
Clean’s only real relationship is with Dianda (Chandler DuPont), an adolescent girl who doesn’t have any family beyond her harried grandmother, Ethel (Michelle Wilson). Dianda reminds Clean of the daughter he once had, and he offers rides, meals, and quiet parental guidance to the girl with the hopes of keeping her off of Utica’s crime-riddled streets. But when he intervenes in a conflict to protect her from a group of hoodlums, including Mikey (Richie Merritt), the son of a local crime boss, Michael (Glenn Fleshler), he becomes embroiled in an all-out war that obliges him to clean up the streets of Utica for good.
While its plot is strictly by the numbers, Clean is elevated by its stylistic flair and propulsive pace. Evocatively depicting the decaying America of Clean’s surroundings, Solet initially seems to be emulating the stark outlaw existentialism of ’70s films like Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle. At the same time, he leans into the slicker exploitation aspects of the story once Clean starts piling up bodies, displaying a knack for chic ultraviolence throughout sequences like a hyperreal brawl at a bowling alley. “The trash man… wasn’t always a trash man,” one gang member quaveringly states upon learning who they’ve gone up against.
Accordingly, Clean giddily takes on a John Wick-like mystique as he stalks around in his imposing garbage truck and hypnotically pulverizes henchmen with a trusty wrench. Brody, with his haunted gait and sorrowful eyes, commits intensely to the role of the vengeful warrior, synthesizing Clean’s savage tendencies with a lived-in sense of grace and fragility.
The MVP of Solet’s 2017 film Bullet Head, Brody juggles co-writing, producing, and music composing duties on this less uneven crime drama while plumbing intriguing depths of emotion in his character, most notably in moments where the ghosts of Clean’s past drift into his present. It may never be in question where Clean’s journey is ultimately headed, but Brody’s layered performance still gives us a reason to care in between the expected brutality.
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