Cedric the Entertainer is a natural performer with charisma to spare, and he brings the funny to his role here. Ced plays Jake, a seemingly regular guy who wakes up in a hotel room with $250,000 in a briefcase and a dead guy in bed with him. He has no memory of who he really is, but a hot-bodied woman named Diane (Nicollette Sheridan of Desperate Housewives) shows up pretending to be his wife. Jake is taken to a mansion as Diane tries to jog his memory.

This is where Cedric does his most inspired work. He is clearly riffing in a scene with a droll butler (played with appropriate dryness by Robert Clarke). It's safe to say, and Cedric confirms with me, that the word Skittles doesn't appear in the script, but sending the butler out for some is priceless. Sheridan, flawless body on display in bra and panties, does her best to seduce Jake, and again, Cedric gets the audience laughing. Every time he ponders incredulously, "I'm married to a white woman," it's good for a laugh.

Code Name: The Cleaner is basically a comic send-up of The Bourne Identity. Jake has the McGuffin that everybody wants. It's a computer chip that has something to do with some espionage mumbo-jumbo (it doesn't matter really). He stumbles and bumbles his way toward finding the chip as he unravels the mystery of who he is and how he wound up in that hotel room with a dead guy. He decides that he must be some sort of secret agent with the code name of The Cleaner. Along the way, he meets a waitress named Gina (Lucy Liu) who claims to be Jake's "boo." She tells him that he is not The Cleaner, he's a cleaner -- a janitor.

Liu, who was so good as Ling on Fox's Ally McBeal a few years back, is appropriately sassy and sexy here. Really sexy. Gina, as it turns out, is more than a waitress, so the movie allows Liu to play broad comedy with Cedric, and also to dust off some of her martial arts movies from Charlie's Angels and Kill Bill.

Especially funny in supporting roles are DeRay Davis and Niecy Nash. Davis, who recently starred in a Comedy Central pilot called The DeRay Way and was seen in Scary Movie 4, plays one of Jake's janitorial co-workers with some hilarious delusions of grandeur. He fancies himself as a cleaning man only until he becomes a rap superstar. (At one point, he challenges an FBI agent to shoot him in the ass to build his street cred.) Nash plays a security guard with a crush on Jake. Her name is Jacuzzi, which she describes as a French name. She is funny every moment that she is onscreen, and that makes me want to check out the Reno 911 TV series on Comedy Central, where she is a regular (playing a character named Raineesha Williams).

Code Name: The Cleaner isn't great art, but it's not trying to pass itself off as anything but funny. Don't look for anything sophisticated. This is broad physical comedy. Imagine Cedric the Entertainer wearing wooden shoes and a Dutch boy costume while leading a dance troupe in a clogging performance. Actually, you don't have to imagine it. It's one of the movie's highlights. Man does not live by Letters from Iwo Jima and Babel alone. Sometimes you need a little Ced.

Fantasy Moguls Lowdown on Code Name: The Cleaner:
Original FantasyMoguls.com projections for Code Name: The Cleaner were for $23 million in box, 2.0 review score, 1 Top 5 point and 0 points for Per Theatre Average (PTA). Based on a review of the movie and updated tracking information, here are Steve's revised projections:
Box Office: $41 million
Review: 5.1
Top 5: 5
PTA: 0