In Cleaner (now streaming on HBO Max), Daisy Ridley plays a window washer on a skyscraper that’s taken over by some terrorists who are being a real (pause for dramatic effect) pane. No apologies. Gotta interesting-up this movie somehow, you know. Anyway, Ridley is in the midst of the stereotypically complicated broke-through-via-Star-Wars career arc (Harrison Ford being the exception), starring in a variety of low-to-medium-profile movies ranging from dodgy sci-fi (Chaos Walking) to stodgy biopics (Young Woman and the Sea) and, uh, demagogy action flicks like Cleaner. The film is directed by wily industry vet Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Green Lantern, a coupla Zorros) and pretty much lives up to the zero expectations we had for it – and if that sounds like faint praise, well, that’s intentional.
CLEANER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: See, it’s “demagogy” because the bad guys are eco-terrorists targeting some bad-in-a-different-way guys who run a corrupt energy conglomerate. No one ever said Cleaner was about nothing! We open with young Joey Locke parkouring out the kitchen window and staring down off the high-rise so she doesn’t have to hear her parents fight; in the present, adult Joey (Ridley) is a window washer who used to be a special forces beater-of-asses, making her a uniquely qualified participant in this plot. Today, she’s already late for work when she gets a call: Her older brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) is being booted out of his care home. He has autism. He carries a toy Thor’s hammer around like a teddy bear. He’s not happy with his treatment and posting about it online. And he’s a hacker, making him a uniquely qualified participant in this plot as well. So Joey plops Michael on the back of her motorcycle and brings him to work with her, so they both may participate in this plot.
A sympathetic security guard agrees to keep an eye on Michael so Joey can dangle off the side of the building in a pseudo-scaffold, spritzing and squeegeeing the windows. We take a minute to establish how Joey is always late, her bosses are dicks and the CEOs of this joint, Agnian Energy, are chubby white sneering cretin brothers who wrinkle their noses at pregnant women of color who work on the cleaning staff, thus establishing them as the racist, misogynist AND classist assholes we already assumed them to be. Tonight, there’s a big party happening, so all the rich, ugly, tuxedoed/ballgowned jerks are in one place. INVENTORY: Room full of rich elitist jagoffs. Regular person with heretofore untapped potential for heroism dangling outside. Vulnerable loved one of regular person with heretofore untapped potential for heroism on the premises. What could possibly go wrong?
INVENTORY UPDATE: Add in some masked terrorists who gain entry by pretending to be the evening’s entertainment. They bust in, pull guns and establish command presence over the roomful of rich, ugly, tuxedoed/ballgowned jerks. They are Earth Revolution, and their leaders are Marcus (Clive Owen) and Noah (Taz Skylar). Squabbling leaders, I might add, as the former is merely a psycho and the latter is a megapsycho who’s OK with killing people and strapping bomb vests on the hostages. Their goal is to expose all Agnian and Agnian-adjacent parties for their corruption – taking bribes, denying climate change, etc. So what we have here is one group of pissants facing off with a second group of pissants. Who are the bigger pissants? YOU TELL ME. And just when you think there’s no hope (note: we never thought that), you remember that Joey is outside the windows, peering in, clocking what’s happening, and eavesdropping on key bits of dialogue and plot. Help them, Obi-Joey Kenobi. You’re their only hope!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Many are dropping Die Hard comparisons from a considerable height. But far fewer are invoking the mighty dopiness of Dwayne Johnson vehicle Skyscraper, like we here at Decider are.
Performance Worth Watching: Disclosure: Clive Owen is in this movie for a disappointingly short amount of time. So that leaves the more-than-capable Ridley to carry the film solo, ably masking her character’s badassery beneath some wide-eyed innocent-bystanderisms.
Memorable Dialogue: Joey sizes up the situation: “You’ve got this, Joey. It’s just like riding a bike 700 feet high in a mangled f—ing cradle, having dead bodies thrown at you.”
Sex and Skin: Nah.
Our Take: And so Cleaner and its thoroughly Stathamesque plot puts Joey in quite a predickymint, as Bugs Bunny might say. All those troubled days of playing Floor is Lava as a kid and sneaky military games as an adult are finally paying off for her! Too bad it comes at the expense of her brother, Plot Device (nee Object of Peril). But it’s ultimately for the greater good, since this LOOK MA, I’M PROVOCATIVE! screenplay aims to take down crooked corporate malfeasancemeisters and violent extremist nihilists bellowing about antihumanism in a spray of bullets that go from far left to far right and back again. Centrism for the win!
Not that the film is particularly nuanced or relevant in the points it mostly accidentally brushes against – at heart, it’s an old-school throwback to ’80s extravaganzaism that’s more interested in delivering thrills than upsetting anyone’s brain with social commentary. Go ahead and interpret the text as an allegory for how it’ll take the average citizen to topple the morally compromised powers that be, which works until you realize that Joey’s lack of agoraphobia, marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat skills are far from average. But maybe it takes the right circumstance to summon the hero from within the average citizen? And perhaps the necessity of Joey’s use of violence in the situation is ultimately a reaction to the seemingly impossible mission of changing anyone’s mind ideologically? How much should we make pretzels out of ourselves here?
The answer is, not much. So an altogether different and more relevant question is, Is the movie at least competent? Sure, especially in the hands of Campbell, who easily groks the basics of escalating tension and comprehensible action. But basic is all that Cleaner is, or seemingly aspires to be. It’s slickly directed, with all the decent visual effects $25 million can buy and the occasional brilliant flash of fight choreography. Ridley’s amiable persona makes it very easy for us to lend our emotional concerns to Joey and her brother. The dialogue is witty in a particularly dumb way. And it gets in and out in a snappy 97 minutes. It’s aggressively just fine in a vaguely unboring manner. Like I said, faint praise. Maybe the faintest.
Our Call: Cleaner is 51 percent watchable, 49 percent forgettable, with the plus-or-minus one due to Ridley being too good for this stuff. So I say STREAM IT, but with a shrug of indifference.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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