In Clean, Adrien Brody is a garbage man named Clean. After a tragedy in his past that haunts him to this day, Clean has gone clean. He’s trying to redeem his past mistakes by cleaning up the streets of Utica. Taking out the trash, literally and metaphorically. Dirty cops and rancid garbage, all must go. An ugly and hilariously on the nose watch, Clean is the kind of self-serious neo-noir that amplifies its navel-gazing faux-grittiness to a point of self-parody, complete with stuffy, gravelly voiceover, written as an obvious attempt to ape Alan Moore’s oft-copied steely nihilism, with streaky, smoky nighttime cinematography that adds nothing but another layer of comical try-hardiness to the overall picture.

Written, produced, starring, and with an original score by Adrien Brody, Clean is obviously a passion project that’s near and dear to the heart of the Academy Award winner but it’s difficult to see where this tale of man-with-violent-past-forced-back-to-his-violent-ways was ever worth telling. There’s been plenty of riffs on John Wick over the past decade but none that so intensely made that Keanu Reeves gun-fu movie look intelligent and awards-caliber by comparison. Clean feels like Brody watched Wick and said, “I can do that. Except gritty.”

The resulting film is a hodgepodge of cliches stacked on top of each other like junkyard cars, the kind of movie that screams the subtext out loud at every chance it gets, and what the script from Brody and co-writer/director Paul Solet (Bullet Head) can’t communicate through hacky dialogue, it angrily whispers in marble-mouthed voiceover. Indebted as much to noir graphic novels as much as old dusty crime dramas and John Wick, Clean’s humorless intensity becomes a source of accidental comic relief. Posturing as a grim avenging angel movie, upon any examination, it’s puffed up with naught but hot air and lazy mimicry.

Clean tries to live a quiet life but is haunted by his violent past. Memories of a blood-soaked wrench are the sheep he counts to go to sleep. Seeking redemption, he gives back to his community; fixing up condemned houses with a fresh coat of paint, brings bagged lunch to the neighborhood girl Dianda (Chandler DuPont) who reminds him of his deceased daughter, and repairing busted electronics to hawk to a pawn shopper owned played by RZA. But when some vaguely Eastern European drug runners who operate their business out of a fish fry front, led by a stinky brute named Michael (Glenn Fleshler), get mixed up with Dianda, a wrench in thrown in his quiet life of solitude and Clean is forced to get his hands dirty.

If you watch closely enough, you can see every painful junction in the movie where Brody and Solet flirt with getting a little playful (I mean the movie is about a now-clean garbage man named Clean cleaning up a dirty city by taking out the trash) but then scurry back to being self-serious and capital-G gritty. It’s admirably funny, their commitment to the lip-biting bit, and makes for a movie that’s fairly fun to laugh at, if not alongside.

Brody is the sticking point here, his sad eye energy and legitimately strong performance almost enough to fuel this otherwise-sour revenge thriller to its painfully-obvious conclusion. But there’s little else to celebrate. The fights, few and far-between as they are, are dark and indecipherable, lots of quick cuts and without a single take longer than a second or two. Functionally, it’s the antithesis of John Wick, where the clarity and whizzbang choreography of the action spectacle elevated the underlying silliness of the premise. This is just empty posturing attached to show muscle. All flab, no fab. The good thing is that as long as there’s movies like Clean, folks will continue to have appreciation for dumb guy movies that are actually done right.

CONCLUSION: Adrien Brody was involved on nearly every level in the conceptualization and realization of brooding revenge-thriller ‘Clean’ but with its ugly aesthetics, empty grittiness, and ridiculously hacky story of a garbage man named Clean “taking out the trash”, you really have to wonder why. Being unintentionally funny at least makes it watchable but otherwise, yikes.