Tag Archives: Swen Temmel

A Sloppy Mess

The Clean Up Crew

by Hope Madden

Jon Keeyes has made a lot of movies, none of them very good. Generally, his films star two actors you’ve heard of and wish were in better films. Sometimes, only one of those two have talent.

The Clean Up Crew stars a couple of Keeyes veterans—the always fun Antonio Banderas (who was in Cult Killer from the same director earlier this year) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who seemed to have talent at one time and also starred in Keeyes’s 2021 effort The Survivalist.

Plus, we get a bonus actor who should be getting better roles, Oscar winner Melissa Leo. Leo and Meyers play one half of a crime scene clean-up crew, alongside drug addled PTSD sufferer Chuck (Swen Temmel), and Meagan (Ekaterina Baker), who’s hoping a sudden windfall will mean that she and Alex (Meyers) can get married.

That windfall is the briefcase full of cash that was left behind at the crime scene they’ve been hired to clean up. It belongs to crime lord Gabriel (Banderas), and he wants it back.

The script by Keeyes’s longtime collaborator Matthew Rogers delivers a solid enough premise and bursts of humor, but nothing holds together. The Clean Up Crew feels like several different movies nonsensically stapled together.

The nonexistent rapport among the characters goes a long way to emphasize the disjointed narrative. At no point do you believe any one of these humans has feelings for any of the others, certainly not that one would risk life and limb for another. It’s not that they don’t seem to like each other as much as they don’t seem to know each other well enough to not hello at Kroger’s.

Meyers may as well be in an entirely different film. Banderas—who likely filmed his scenes over a weekend in a single location far from everyone else—basically is in a different film. His is more fun because, to his credit, the actor seems to be doing what he can to enjoy himself.

Leo struggles mightily with her curious Irish brogue, and no one scene predicts the next in any logical way. Keeyes can’t decide whether or not to treat the violence as comedy, but it certainly appears from nowhere and builds to a showdown no one really wants that delivers no type of narrative satisfaction.

The Clean Up Crew is a comedy that’s not funny, a thriller with no thrills, and a flat action flick sutured together into a dizzyingly incoherent paycheck for a few actors who deserve better, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Painful History

American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally

by Hope Madden

A film about Mildred Gillars—better known as Axis Sally, American broadcaster based in Berlin during WWII—could be interesting. Gillars was an Ohioan and thwarted entertainer who found herself in Berlin just before the war. She threw her talents to Goebbels’s propaganda efforts and became one of the most popular radio announcers in the world, even in the U.S.

She was eventually tried for treason. But was it treason if she was no longer an American citizen? Was it treason if she was simply a voice talent, not the writer of the content? And even if she stood behind what she had to say, wasn’t that just free speech?

So much to dig into! And the director is Michael Polish, whose career is littered with underseen treasures like Twin Falls, Idaho, Northfork, and For Lovers Only.

Those gems were penned by Polish’s brother Mark. American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally was not. Michael co-wrote this script with first-time screenwriter Darryl Hicks, as well as Vance Owen, co-author of the book on which the film is based.

They do not possess Mark Polish’s poetic gifts.

They do have Al Pacino, though. As defense attorney James Laughlin, Pacino is Pacino—disheveled, fun, scrappy. He gets to deliver one of those passionate closing arguments you find only in movies. And he mines this dog meat of a script for a character.

Every moment he is off-screen is unendurable.

Meadow Williams takes the approach opposite Pacino’s, delivering an entirely superficial turn as Gillars. Part of this performance could pass for stoicism, but in flashback sequences of levity, she is painful. During her emotional breakthroughs, you may need to look away.

So, she fits right in. Aside from Pacino, the cast is uniformly awful. Some are worse than others. Thomas Kretschmann and Carsten Norgaard do not embarrass themselves as Goebbels and Gillars’s beau Max, respectively. As Laughlin’s in-court right-hand man Billy Owen, Swen Temmel does.

Pacino’s in his eighties and still makes about three films a year. Before this, it was The Irishman and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Two out of three ain’t bad.