Clean Review: Adrien Brody’s Broody Arthouse John Wick Misses The Mark

screenrant.com:

There are a lot of Hollywood combinations: writer-director, actor-director, musician-actor, and so forth. The rare exception, however, is Adrien Brody (The French Dispatch) in Clean. As the actor-composer-writer of the film, he's doing the near impossible by wearing three hats and wearing them well. He and director-screenwriter Paul Solet (Mars) penned the script together and they certainly had the right idea with Clean, albeit without the vision to elevate it to a truly watchable movie.

When Clean (Brody) gives up a life of crime for a day job as a garbage man, the demons of his hometown make him second guess the decision to retire. His only hope lies with Dianda (Chandler DuPont), the friend of his now-dead daughter. Clean keeps an eye on Dianda and brings her school lunch every day. His entire character is summed up in an encounter with Dianda’s grandmother, Ethel (Michelle Wilson), who reminds Clean that he is not Dianda’s father just because he lost his own. She also tells him he is a good person, which he flatly denies. Clean has a lot of goodwill in the community. He feeds a dog at a scrapyard, repurposes what he finds there, sells it to a pawnshop owner played by RZA (The Man With The Iron Fists), and uses that profit to buy cheap paint and nails. It's all so he can repair local abandoned houses that criminals and kids routinely live in and destroy. But when one of those criminals goes too far with Dianda, the old Clean — rather, the real Clean — resurfaces and the film sets up a bloody reckoning in its final act.

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It’s no secret that Brody’s time in front of the camera — between the most recent season of HBO Max’s