The Clean Up Crew, with Antonio Banderas

Gabriel the crime boss likes quoting Machiavelli and forcing his prisoners to play Russian roulette, because he thinks they are both intimidating. At least once, someone should tell him: “go stuff your Machiavelli, I read Sun Tzu.” He is less than thrilled about paying-off the anti-crime task force, but he accepts it as a cost of doing business. When a group of crime-scene cleaners find their overdue payoff stashed up the chimney, both the gangsters and the crooked cops will come looking for them in Jon Keeyes’ The Clean Up Crew, which releases tomorrow on-demand.

Gabriel might possibly have been dragging his heels a little too long with their latest payment, so when two rogue thugs temporally intercept the bribe money, the cops threaten to expose Gabriel’s operation. With full-scale war on the horizon, maybe he really should be reading The Art of War.

It is quite a mess by the time the cleaners got there. Nobody escaped the Mexican standoff cleanly, but one of the injured thugs survived to return to the scene of the crime just as Alex and his co-workers were leaving with the money. Somehow, the cops missed it, but in their defense, they were probably just incompetent.

Alex’s boss, Siobhan just wants to turn it over to the cops, but his fiancée Meagan convinces him to take the money, for the sake of their future. Fortunately, the drug-addicted former-something-military Chuck can handle Gabriel’s wounded enforcer. In fact, they decide to take him with them. Soon, Gabriel returns the favor, kidnapping Meagan, which enrages Alex, making him much more amenable to Chuck’s methods.

Throughout it all, Antonio Banderas is highly entertaining preening and gorging on scenery as Gabriel, the pretentious crime boss. He elevates the character above his literary quirks, raising the level of the film with him. Derek Carroll and Conor Mullen also add some nice gritty energy as Gabriel’s police contacts.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers has never sounded more like Scott Adkins than he does here playing Alex. He is a lot less successful trying to fight like Adkins (by design), but he anchors the film quite solidly. Swen Temmel stirs up the chaos nicely as Chuck, but Melissa Leo seems miscast as the scheming Siobhan.

Nevertheless, The Clean Up Crew is generally quite watchable and often even rather amusing. Keeyes keeps the pace brisk and screenwriter Matthew Rogers’ dialogue is pretty snappy. It is not a classic, but if you just want to stream a violent crime caper, it is definitely the sort of film that never makes viewers wait around for it to get going. Recommended when it hits ad-supported platforms as a diversion you don’t have to take too seriously, The Clean Up Crew releases tomorrow (8/20) on digital and on-demand.