I don't think that I need to go into too much detail as to why movies about terrorists, particularly suicide bombers disturb me and make me uncomfortable. It's a subject that I feel quite strongly about, and even bringing it up makes me mad on a base level, not from a patriotic, chest-thumping, "I'm going to write a racist country song" position but from a position of it disgusting me as a human being.
On the other hand, I get to see Sean Bean kick some butt. I think I can maintain for that.
"Cleanskin" is an action film that takes some liberties with standard action film narratives. The story is mostly told out of order, as we flash forward and backward throughout a period of time of about 3 years, following what led the characters to the point they are at in the present day. However, not everything is always shown, which has the benefit of adding intrigue, which makes "Cleanskin" comes off as something closer to a spy thriller without the spies, but also has the unfortunate side-effect of rendering the plot a tad hard to follow, and making certain character's motivations somewhat hazy and unconvincing.
Sean Bean plays Ewan, a British secret service agent working to take down a ring of terrorists in London. He's a bit of a cold bastard, to put to lightly, and he has absolutely no problems setting someone on fire, as long as he suspects them of being a terrorist. To be fair, he is damaged goods, as his wife was killed in a suicide bombing years ago, so he has little sympathy for them. Still, this is our hero, ladies and gentlemen - A borderline psychopath from the Jack Bauer school of diplomacy.
Here we have Sean asking what time it is.
I call him our hero, yet not our protagonist, as it seems to me that Ash, the law school dropout who turns domestic terrorist, is our main character, at least in terms of who it is we're following most of the movie. A good portion of "Cleanskin" is focused on him, with Sean Bean only showing up every once in a while to beat someone up and then shoot them in the brain. So while Ash is clearly one of the villains, I'd say he's as close to a main character as this movie can get.
Ash is also probably the biggest issue I took with this film. Abhin Galeya, who plays him, can come across and intense and brooding, but I never really discovered the "why" of his character, which is a big point of the film. "Cleanskin" is supposed to be about the exploration of the mindset of a man who is willing to blow himself up, along with dozens of innocents, for a cause they feel is just. And while it does delve into that a little, it's hardly enough to make the character convincing.
The fractured nature of the narrative means that there are big chunks of Ash's life that we don't see. His mentor sends him to Afghanistan to make him tougher, and we assume he does since we're never told that Ash doesn't go, and his girlfriend seems to be quite upset because he left when she sees him again after another flash-forward. But we don't see Ash in Afghanistan, and we never hear about anything that happened while he was there. I guess we're supposed to assume that he became harder and more resolute.
But if you were to ask me, I couldn't spot a single thing about Ash that had changed after he came back. He seemed like the exact same person. If it was supposed to be an underlying, subtle change in him that "Cleanskin" was attempting to convey, boy did they drop the ball there, because I didn't catch any of it. And it was to the point that I actually thought the most pivotal scene of the film, the scene were he finally decides to go through with the suicide bombing, was actually showing him giving up on terrorism and deciding to be with his girlfriend.
And that's not a twist - I just think it's really bad characterization.
"I'm kind of bored. Might as well blow myself up."
What that means is that you have what amounts to a really, really lame villain because there isn't a single point when you believe his motivations, or even understand his motivations. During the climax, when it's a race between him and Sean Bean to see if Ash will manage to get to his target and blow it up, it's inter-spliced with video footage of Ash's confession/martyr note B.S. saying crap like "You have ignored us for too long, now will we make you suffer blah blah blah I'm an asshole" and whatnot. It's supposed to let us inside his head, but since we've never been told what's going on in his head, and we've never seen a good reason why he's so mad, it comes off as exceedingly whiny.
If you're going to have a movie about the mind of a suicide bomber, you'd better do some damn convincing writing. You can't just say "And then he met a militant Islamic preacher who told him to leave his girlfriend and kill a bunch of people and he decided to do just that." I mean, the dude had a good thing going in London. He had a nice life, a smoking hot girlfriend, and was set up to have a successful career in law. But then he met a dude with some anti-Semitic flyers and decided to kill people? Please.
Speaking of his girlfriend, she was one of the more interesting aspects of the film for me, even though she really didn't end up doing much or mattering very much. She's played by Tuppence Middleton, and by Crom is she gorgeous. Seriously. Stone cold beautiful. I just had to throw that out there.
Those eyes could be classified as WMDs.
It's just too bad that nothing ever really comes of her character. I realize that Ash leaving her is supposed to be pivotal to his story, but when his story is so unconvincing anyway it really ended up not mattering very much. So he leaves her. Big deal. It's not like it matters. I know nothing about this guy, so his "heart wrenching" decision to leave her falls pretty flat. And that's too bad because Tuppence Middleton is actually very, very good in this movie. She deserved better.
Overall this is an ugly movie. It's a mean movie. I'm sure that's the point. It's supposed to be hard to look at, but nobody in "Cleanskin" is very likeable, honestly. Tuppence Middleton comes the closest, but she's reduced to a nothing character. Sean Bean is always awesome to watch, but if Sean Bean is the "hero," I don't want to see him beating the hell out of a prostitute to get information from her, and then straight up letting her get murdered after he uses her as bait to catch a terrorist. That's something he should be doing as a villain.
Sean Bean as a villain I love. But if Sean Bean is the hero, which means he actually stands a chance of seeing the end credits alive, then damn it, I want him to be the hero! He doesn't always have to be an asshole, you know. He can do both!
Maybe it's just a mug built for villainy...
THE BOTTOM LINE - There's not much to recommend with "Cleanskin." I love Sean Bean but this isn't one of his better films. There's much better Bean vehicles to watch, like "Black Death." For movies that deal with terrorism better, I'd watch "Unthinkable" with Samuel L. Jackson. Hell watch "Air Force One." That movie actually dealt with the mindset of terrorism far better than "Cleanskin." Skip it.
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