Freakin' fabulous! Think Death Wish and Nobody, but darker and more brooding.
It also reminded me lots of Joaquin Phoenix's 2017 You Were Never Really Here, which is an equally meditative, atmospheric, solitary, intimate production about vengeance, redemption, and relationship.
And [un]holy smoke, what a gun! I gotta get me one of those large honkin' blasters :-)
I can think of many, many friends who'd love this film. Like Bradley Cooper's 2014 American Sniper, maybe that should be arranged someday?
Adrien Brody was great this past season in Succession, but with 74 films under his belt now (The Pianist among them), he brings the goods nearly every. single. time.
If you go, don't expect something lengthy, complicated, or all that exciting; it's mostly a haunting, lonely, repetitive loop of same-same-same / graveyard-shift after graveyard-shift, but its Drive-like ethos, quality, and overall 'vibe' (to say nothing of Act III) is (for my money) where it's absolutely at: A rather under-the-radar character like Keyser Söze who is, scene after scene, irresistible to watch and wonder what's-a-comin' 'round the bend next.
Remember David Carradine's 1972-1975 TV series Kung Fu in which his character (Kwai Chang Caine) wanders around California helping innocents and wronging rights? That's akin to how I felt watching Clean: wholly unornamented, character driven, and just enough 'fight' midway through and at the end to keep you coming back for more.
Clean's copyright is 2018, and I wish very much they'd released it way back then, but at this point I'm simply delighted it got to see the light of day at all after so many years waiting atop the highest shelf near the back in some independent studio.
Oh, p.s., my wife says to make it clear: "This is NOT a family-friendly film," so no, do not take the kiddos. Not because of language or carnality, but because of violence-violence-violence. And blood, because you better believe there will be blood, and LOTS of it!
