Renny Harlin is not a director known for subtlety or in-depth characterisation and that's just fine for making gleefully over-the-top action movies such as Die Hard 2 and The Long Kiss Goodnight. With Cleaner, he seems to have tried to stretch himself and it looks as if it hurt. This self-consciously gloomy thriller stars Samuel L Jackson as a former cop who now runs a company that cleans up the mess after a body has been taken away. After one particularly unpleasant job, he becomes mixed up in a mystery involving his ex-partner (Ed Harris, who spends the entire movie looking as if he's about to combust), a beautiful woman (Eva Mendes), whose husband has gone missing, and a brutish detective (Luis Guzman) who starts asking tough questions. If that's not enough, his daughter has started asking tough questions about her mother's murder. Jackson is suitably low-key as a man with a burdensome secret and there are a couple of nice atmospheric touches, but Harlin struggles with the talky, convoluted script. It's as if he's hoping there will be an opportunity to blow something up. There isn't.

Single father and former cop Tom Cutler has an unusual occupation: he cleans up death scenes. But when he's called in to sterilize a wealthy suburban residence after a brutal shooting, Cutler is shocked to learn he may have unknowingly erased crucial evidence, entangling himself in a dirty criminal cover-up.