Watching this movie, I kept thinking they couldn't afford to have a real script written, and must have run out of money when they were about 2/3 of the way through, and couldn't finish editing it. Not to mention, they probably couldn't afford Martin Lawrence for the lead role, so they filled it with Cedric the Entertainer, who does better in supporting roles. Cedric does have several funny scenes, though.

The plot is completely unintelligible, and undeveloped, but based on the genre you can predict most of the action. It's the ever-popular "hero has something secret the bad guys want, so they can sell it to terrorists for a fortune, but it's missing." Not to mention, the scenes or "shticks" that have been better done elsewhere. For example, every time Cedric tried to be funny with judo moves, I kept thinking that he ripped that off from Martin, who does it much better. There is a brief cat-fight scene that is far inferior to the one in Undercover Brother (which is an excellent movie, and much funnier overall).

Codename: The Cleaner reviewed by Sam Osborn

Welcome to January, generally known as the first of two months that consist mostly of studio duds poured discretely from the back of the release slate and into your multiplexes. Like a late August release, January and February releases generally spell 'trash,' with the best of them offering only a nonsensical relief from the heavy, fading awards season. Thus, we have Codename: The Cleaner.

It's the latest work from director Les Mayfield, a man whose earlier films (Flubber, American Outlaws, The Man) are best described as righteously mediocre. This January gem weighs in on a case of missing identity and FBI espionage with Cedric the Entertainer playing Jake Rodgers, waking up in a hotel bed with a dead FBI agent and a cut above his ear. His memory's been fried, leaving him without a name and only fragments of what looks to be a secrets ops combat mission batting around his brain. Diane—played by Nicollete Sheridan, whose beauty has been stretched and manipulated to the point of mimicking a mask from White Chicks—approaches Jake in the hotel lobby, filling him in on some important details pertaining to their supposed marriage and occupation of a bloated estate mansion. It all turns out to be farce, however, when Jake overhears Diane plotting to send Jake into cardiac arrest over a bit of information surrounding a computer chip. Soon Jake's on the run, doing his best play-pretend imitation of spy work, trying to hunt down the computer chip and unveil his own identity.

Like last year's You, Me, and Dupree, Codename: The Cleaner banks heavily on the likability of its lead, giving him the screen-time equivalent of carte blanche. But where Owen Wilson's sly, sandy-haired innocence can grow tiresome, Cedric's rotund antics are nothing if not charming. He leaps to great and often desperate lengths to mine a chuckle, but sometimes surprises us by shoveling out something truly hilarious. So it's a shame that the material surrounding him offers little more than static. Lucy Liu is superbly misused as Jake's girlfriend, rattling off forced punch-lines and rickety, unfitting "sistah" feistiness to match Ms. Sheridan's miscasting as the young, busty blonde (the joke here, I suppose, is that Ms Sheridan's peaked forty). The plot feels improvised; so weak that is seems to modify itself according to whatever improvisation Cedric throws at the script. It all comes together like a Jackie Chan Hong Kong action picture, only with Cedric the Entertainer doing the karate. It works, but only if you slouch in your seat and let your ears and eyes glaze over in a popcorn haze. It is January, after all.

Sam Osborn

I was expecting this movie to be horrible, but it wasn't quite that bad. It actually had a few funny and amusing moments. When Jake runs into Diane, played by the hot Nicole Sheridan, and she says she is his wife, his reaction is pretty funny. " I have a hot white wife." And then takes him to his supposed home, and its a huge mansion. He keeps having flashbacks of combat/fighting and has convinced himself he's a secret agent. But we learn he is just an avid video game player. That part was amusing.

The plot is silly but it definitely is not one of the worst movies of the year. 14 year olds will probable like it.

FINAL VERDICT: This is nothing to go out of your way to see. But if you catch it on TV and want 90 minutes of mindless entertainment you may want to check it out.