CODE NAME: THE CLUNKER

"Flubber" was aimed at children, and it was succesful in that respect. If you can see films through a child's prespective you might like them. But "Codname: The Cleaner" probably isn't one of those films. Am I right? 

Contains spoilers.

I've been thinking lately about what HeadRAZZ had to say about a major star (or, in this case, stars) responsibility for getting movies made.  If Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu and Nicolette Sheridan had said no, Code Name: The Cleaner wouldn't have been made.  And even though they signed on, they should have used their clout to, at the very least, (spoiler) rewrite the climax so you don't have the muscle gliding across a waxed floor fast enough to crash through an office window and be knocked out cold, or make little use of what's in a janitor's cart.  That bugs me.  My first job as a teenager was a janitor, and you usually work your floor alone, giving you plenty of time to think and horse around.  For someone who's been obsessed with war action video games to the point he can tell when a game chip is behaving differently, Cedric's character Jake sure hasn't spent any time imagining how he would use his work tools as weapons.  Just off the top of my head, you have a horse hair brush used for dusting and sweeping made out of thick round hard plastic that would make one hell of a club. And you have a gong brush used for cleaning the dust on the carpet next to the walls and for scrubbing that's made out of the same thick plastic that, if thrown, would give you one nasty knock.  That's not even getting into the mop, the dust mop, the broom, the scraper, the various cleaners in spray bottles or the attachments to the vacuum, let alone the vacuum itself.  Jake managed to use a mop and a bucket, and he only thought that up on the spur of the moment. 

So, although I wouldn't vote for any of them because I felt they were having fun with the material, I withdraw any objection to others voting for them because they are, to a significant degree, responsible for the movie not being better.  And it really could have been made better.

I wouldn't quite agree with choices #2 and 3.  I see them as average but not terrible; even relatively weak John Hughes scripts are well above the industry average.  Maybe if he'd stuck with Chris Columbus at the helm instead of Mayfield (or done it himself, which is of course usually the only way if you want it done right), the results would have been a little better.