Familiar Thrills Are Still Thrills
There are certain movies that pull their premise off so successfully that they become genres unto themselves. Freaky Friday, Before Sunrise, Groundhog Day, movies that to this day you can still take their basic high concept and just do it again and so long as you add some new ingredients (“Freaky Friday but it’s a slasher movie; Groundhog Day but Tom Cruise is fighting aliens; Before Sunrise but it’s Barack and Michelle) and do your own thing with the format, you can still have a winner.
Which brings us to Cleaner, releasing this Friday (2/21). Starring Daisy Ridley and directed by Martin Campbell (Goldeneye, Casino Royale), Cleaner is doing a Die Hard. And Cleaner knows that you know it’s doing a Die Hard, and it knows that you know how Die Hard plays out. Armed with that knowledge, Cleaner nimbly plays the hits while also finding places to subvert and undercut audience expectations.
Ridley plays Joey Locke, a lifelong screw-up and Army washout currently barely holding down a job as a window cleaner for an energy company’s skyscraper in London. Joey also looks after her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) who as the movie begins has just been kicked out of another care-home. The early goings of the film quickly and effectively sketch out the details of Joey and Michael’s difficult childhood, their current fraught relationship, and Joey’s self-destructive nature.
As an actor, Ridley is at an interesting moment where she’s obviously quite famous thanks to the Star Wars films but is still trying to make a name for herself outside of her character in a massive franchise. The strategy seems to be trying different kinds of roles in various genres to see what sticks, and I’m happy to say that she wears ‘action heroine’ quite well. The obvious character comparison is John McClane, and Ridley strikes a similar balance between being sympathetic and being enough of a pain in the ass that you understand why she can’t keep a job or figure things out with her brother.
About her brother: Michael is autistic but it’s the kind of movie autism where it only seems to manifest in him carrying around a Mjolnir toy the whole movie and being a super-hacker which I’m sure will not be relevant to an action movie scenario. This kind of magical disability is nothing new, and Cleaner isn’t the worst or most offensive example (The Accountant 2 coming up soon so…there’s that). But it’s such a hoary old trope and Michael’s tics are such a copy of a copy of a copy of Rain Man that I just wish they hadn’t done it. You don’t need some special excuse for why siblings would have a difficult relationship as adults, so this feels like the screenplay adding in one cliché too many.
But I also want to praise the screenplay for the efficiency with which it lays out this particular gameboard. I’ve seen enough action movies that flub basic mechanics to appreciate when one constructs its plot through clean cause and effect storytelling. Michael gets kicked out of his home, so Joey is late for work, so her boss makes her stay late, which is why she’s still dangling outside the building when the company’s party gets raided by eco-terrorists.
Our main baddies are leader Marcus (Clive Owen) and unhinged henchman Noah (Taz Skylar), who are seeking to hold the company leadership accountable for not only their climate-destroying policies but also the public lies and corrupt dealings that have made them all the more rich and powerful while the world burns.
It’s once these pieces are in motion that Cleaner starts having fun riffing on and diverging from expectations. While the bad guys in Die Hard were a more or less united front, there are fractures between Marcus and Noah that allows Cleaner to explore new ideas within the familiar format and keep viewers on their toes.
Owen knows exactly what he was hired to do and he brings the necessary gusto and swagger to his terrorist leader.
The real surprise is Skylar, who I know from his performance as Sanji on the Netflix adaptation of One Piece. On One Piece, Skylar was immediately both lovable and happily ridiculous, perfectly straddling the line between sincere humanity and the gonzo extremes of anime. Here, armed with a shaved head and a maniacal gleam in his eyes, he’s a legitimately unsettling villain and it’s a lot of fun watching him bounce off the steely Ridley.
With Die Hard, director John McTiernan famously asked for a rewrite to turn the terrorists into thieves masquerading as terrorists, arguing that that would be more fun. In Cleaner, though, the villains are indeed terrorists, but they’re also completely correct in their beliefs and their ‘victims’ are odious bastards even without the whole ‘actively killing the world for a buck’ thing.
It’s another interesting wrinkle in the set-up and speaks to how Cleaner stays one step ahead of the audience to keep things fresh.
The action is a little more sparing than I would like, with Joey remaining stuck outside the building for quite a while. When she finally gets inside and things get more physical, Campbell demonstrates again that he’s one of the best we have in staging practical, comprehensible action. The hand-to-hand and gunplay is all very well done: fast, brutal, exaggerated enough to be fun but not tipping over into John Wick-ian gun-fu. Ridley is front and center for much of it, throwing herself into the fray and acquitting herself well.
Cleaner doesn’t reinvent the wheel but, you know what? The wheel is great, it works fine, it doesn’t need reinventing. Who are you weirdos asking for new kinds of wheels, anyway? I’m sure Silicon Valley has a couple different multi-billion dollars ventures sunk into exploding the paradigms of the wheel industry, go bother them. Freak.
For the rest of you, Cleaner is a straightforward, well-made, and well-acted programmer. It’s not in the upper tier of “Die Hard on a…” movies like Speed, but it’ll fit right in alongside the dozens of others in the category under that: your Die Hard sequels, your Under Sieges, your Air Force Ones, etc.
At a time when studios are cutting and reshooting their movies dozens of times and then slapping the movie-shaped thing together and shoving it into theaters, and at a time when streamers are cranking out ‘content’ that seems algorithmically generated from first frame to last, I more and more appreciate sturdy, meat and potatoes fare like this. The old tricks still work just fine so long as you bother to play them properly.
Cleaner is in theaters Friday.
