Cleaner opens in theaters Friday, February 21.
Some villains you love to hate, some you hate to love. And then there are the ones that kind of have a point. In Cleaner, the latest drip into the bottomless mop bucket of Die Hard clones, masked eco-terrorists crash the London skyscraper soirée of a multinational energy corporation. They’re not secretly out for money like Hans Gruber and his goons. No, these are true believers – bleeding hearts ready to bleed Mother Earth’s enemies dry. And as the leader of the group (Clive Owen) lays out his master plan to crash the company, and the bigwig hostages start confessing at gunpoint to burying environmental impact reports and financially backing climate-change deniers, you really have to wonder: Who are we supposed to be rooting for here exactly?
That would be Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley), Britain’s limber female answer to John McClane. Gun-toting radicals are just one trouble facing this military vet, who makes ends meet up high, cleaning the windows of the tower HQ the bad guys seize. Joey is on thin ice with her boss (at least before he catches a bullet between the eyes), and stressed out by the full-time responsibility of looking after her autistic brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), who keeps getting booted out of care facilities. Like many neurodivergent movie characters, Michael is also a computer wiz – one of several hoary tropes Cleaner dusts off over its brisk 96 minutes. Their shared traumatic backstory is another.
Joey spends an unusually large percentage of that runtime stuck on the side of the building. (Improbably, the high-rise cradle can only be operated by her boss from a control room above; stranding your cleaners on a rickety platform with no manual override protocol is yet another strike against a company that really seems to have it coming.) Ridley, clenching her jaw with Jedi-like determination, is a fine fit for the working-class hero routine, but she’s a long way from her tenure in a galaxy far, far away. The Star Wars curse is no joke: One minute you’re headlining the most popular movie franchise of them all, the next you’re mopping the floor with generic henchmen in Redbox fare.
Ridley isn’t the only blockbuster veteran slumming it here. The movie is directed by Martin Campbell, a proficient journeyman who used to make Hollywood event pictures (his Casino Royale is a dazzling, dizzying highpoint of the James Bond series) but now exclusively applies his chops to straightforward B-movies like The Foreigner and The Protégé. He’s dropped the definite article this time (Cleaner is cleaner, and a fine title for such a legible action vehicle) while still offering the kind of no-frills thrills that’s made him a favorite of adrenaline junkies with classical meat-and-potato sensibilities. The closest Campbell ever gets to flashiness is an early montage of Joey racing across town to make it to work on time, cutting off each expletive she utters with a cutaway.
In theory, this is the kind of genre exercise we’re supposed to cherish for its leanness and lack of pretensions – a blessed alternative to bloated effects spectacles. (It’s certainly a breezier time than The Rock’s adventure through a towering inferno, Skyscraper.) But Cleaner doesn’t have the juice, or enough distinguishing its Die Hardian antics from any other imitation’s. The dialogue is all clichés. “We are in,” brags the bad guys’ resident, obligatory hacker (Flavia Watson). “What we got?” asks the seasoned superintendent (Ruth Gemmell) late to the scene. “Find them!” bellows the other Gruber substitute (Taz Skylar), a more extreme extremist who wires the whole building to a wrist monitor, threatening to blow the place sky high if his pulse stops or even slows. Thankfully for the hostages, the device isn’t tracking our heart rate.
Cleaner has one halfway clever twist up its sleeve – a surprising reconfiguration of the villainous hierarchy. Otherwise, it mostly goes through the motions, one picked-off goon at a time. The most novel element might be the rather sympathetic motives of the antagonists, and how much method there is to their madness. But is that a productive tweak on formula? The rugged individualism of the Die Hard model gels uncomfortably with bad guys who are literally fighting for the greater good. You shouldn’t be wondering if these radicals deserve a newsletter or podcast instead of a long plummet to their doom.
