Cedric the Entertainer is never going to be Cedric the Leading Man.
His comic gifts, tucked into compact and funny supporting roles in movies such as “Barbershop,” “Be Cool” or “Intolerable Cruelty,” can’t carry a movie, which is what the leading man has to do.
The sooner he and Hollywood figure this out, the sooner he’ll stop inflicting embarrassments such as “The Honeymooners” or “Johnson Family Vacation” on us.
At least his latest, “Code Name: The Cleaner,” is more ambitious than his earlier leads. But he can’t lift this story of an amnesiac who is either a secret agent or a janitor because his clueless character is the only one who doesn’t realize how absurd one of those possibilities is.
Guy wakes up in a strange hotel with a bloody ear, a headache, a briefcase full of cash, and a dead FBI agent in bed with him.
Ouch. A deadly blond (Nicollette Sheridan of TV’s “Desperate You-Know-What”) shows up and tries to seduce him into revealing the whereabouts of a missing microchip. An ill-tempered waitress (Lucy Liu, funny in a supporting part) claims to be his “Boo” (girlfriend). Cops and killers are trying to catch him.
And he keeps having these flashbacks, to shootouts, commando operations, to the fight in the hotel room where he woke up with a dead man.
Cedric makes the most of a couple of Cedric-friendly bits — his early confusion over his marital status — “I’m married. To a white woman? Does my momma know about you?” Mostly, though, he mugs. He talks to himself, because the script has long stretches where he’s alone, trying to decode his life. Too much of the banter feels over-rehearsed.
Director Les Mayfield (“The Man,” “Blue Streak”) has only 90 minutes to work with, and the film still drags.
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Running time: 1:30. MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sexual content, crude humor and some violence).
