Cleaner opens in theaters Friday, February 21.
Some villains you like to hate, some you hate to like. And then there are those that sort of have a degree. In Cleaner, the most recent drip into the bottomless mop bucket of Die Hard clones, masked eco-terrorists crash the London skyscraper soirée of a multinational vitality company. They’re not secretly out for cash like Hans Gruber and his goons. No, these are true believers – bleeding hearts able to bleed Mother Earth’s enemies dry. And because the chief of the group (Clive Owen) lays out his grasp plan to crash the corporate, and the bigwig hostages begin confessing at gunpoint to burying environmental affect experiences and financially backing climate-change deniers, you actually should marvel: Who are we presupposed to be rooting for right here precisely?
That can be Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley), Britain’s limber feminine reply to John McClane. Gun-toting radicals are only one hassle going through this navy vet, who makes ends meet up excessive, cleansing the home windows of the tower HQ the unhealthy guys seize. Joey is on skinny ice together with her boss (no less than earlier than he catches a bullet between the eyes), and stressed by the full-time duty of taking care of her autistic brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), who retains getting booted out of care amenities. Like many neurodivergent film characters, Michael can also be a pc wiz – considered one of a number of hoary tropes Cleaner dusts off over its brisk 96 minutes. Their shared traumatic backstory is one other.
Joey spends an unusually massive share of that runtime caught on the aspect of the constructing. (Improbably, the high-rise cradle can solely be operated by her boss from a management room above; stranding your cleaners on a rickety platform with no handbook override protocol is one more strike in opposition to an organization that basically appears to have it coming.) Ridley, clenching her jaw with Jedi-like dedication, is a high-quality match for the working-class hero routine, however she’s a great distance from her tenure in a galaxy far, distant. The Star Wars curse is not any joke: One minute you’re headlining the most well-liked film franchise of all of them, the subsequent you’re mopping the ground with generic henchmen in Redbox fare.
Ridley isn’t the one blockbuster veteran slumming it right here. The film is directed by Martin Campbell, a proficient journeyman who used to make Hollywood occasion footage (his Casino Royale is a stunning, dizzying highpoint of the James Bond sequence) however now solely applies his chops to easy B-movies like The Foreigner and The Protégé. He’s dropped the particular article this time (Cleaner is cleaner, and a high-quality title for such a legible motion car) whereas nonetheless providing the sort of no-frills thrills that’s made him a favourite of adrenaline junkies with classical meat-and-potato sensibilities. The closest Campbell ever will get to flashiness is an early montage of Joey racing throughout city to make it to work on time, reducing off every expletive she utters with a cutaway.
In concept, that is the sort of style train we’re presupposed to cherish for its leanness and lack of pretensions – a blessed different to bloated results spectacles. (It’s actually a breezier time than The Rock’s journey via a towering inferno, Skyscraper.) But Cleaner doesn’t have the juice, or sufficient distinguishing its Die Hardian antics from another imitation’s. The dialogue is all clichés. “We are in,” brags the unhealthy guys’ resident, compulsory hacker (Flavia Watson). “What we acquired?” asks the seasoned superintendent (Ruth Gemmell) late to the scene. “Find them!” bellows the opposite Gruber substitute (Taz Skylar), a extra excessive extremist who wires the entire constructing to a wrist monitor, threatening to blow the place sky excessive if his pulse stops and even slows. Thankfully for the hostages, the gadget isn’t monitoring our coronary heart fee.
Cleaner has one midway intelligent twist up its sleeve – a shocking reconfiguration of the villainous hierarchy. Otherwise, it principally goes via the motions, one picked-off goon at a time. The most novel factor could be the slightly sympathetic motives of the antagonists, and the way a lot methodology there may be to their insanity. But is {that a} productive tweak on formulation? The rugged individualism of the Die Hard mannequin gels uncomfortably with unhealthy guys who’re actually preventing for the higher good. You shouldn’t be questioning if these radicals deserve a publication or podcast as a substitute of an extended plummet to their doom.
