I think the best thing about Martin Campbell’s Cleaner is that it knows exactly what it wants to be and doesn’t aspire to push beyond those limitations. Better yet, it doesn’t want to try to one-up its obviously biggest influence, Die Hard, both being movies about a corporate party interrupted by terrorists while someone runs around trying to put a monkey wrench in their plans. There are a few new wrinkles here and there, but both films share the same narrative springboard.
Cleaner is a kind of movie where if you’re flipping around the pay station block of channels on your cable box’s guide and hit “Select” on it, you won’t want to turn it off – if, for nothing else, just to see where the story leads. The script by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton wisely keeps this story in the realm of possibility, where a window cleaner is stuck on her window-washing platform while she watches knockout gas neutralize the building’s occupants and an armed team taking them hostage. However, the terrorists don’t want money; they want the public to know the truth about a large energy company’s misdeeds – bribery, corruption, and even contract murder.
Campbell rushes to get Joanna “Joey” Locke (Daisy Ridley) into position, quickly setting up her troubled childhood and relationship with autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck), who’s just been kicked out of his living placement for hacking into their systems. They’re not on the best of terms – we later find out there’s resentment from one of them having to take the lion’s share of their father’s beatings – but she has no choice but to bring him along to work, passing him off to a friendly security guard. Her tardiness garners ire from her supervisor, who pettily puts her on “bird strike” cleanup; he also takes pleasure in overriding her descender rig to keep her out there, which is right about the time the terrorists kick his office door in.
It’s interesting to see how terrorism has transitioned in cinema. We were so used to the ushanka-wearing “commie bastards” and the Muslim jihadists in the ‘80s and ‘90s pushing their agendas with crazy eyes and guns. Now, we have white eco-terrorists who consider humanity a scourge on the planet, and cleansing this scourge starts with taking out the heads of the corporations and those who enable them. That’s where we are with Marcus (Clive Owen) and Noah (Taz Skylar), the leader and right-hand man leading this team into the Agnian Energy building and calling CEO and owner brothers Geoffrey (Rufus Jones) and Gerald Milton (Lee Boardman) to the carpet.
This looks and feels more like the kind of films Campbell used to do in the ‘90s, where character development is teased out to keep us hooked as the film progresses (as opposed to dumping gobs of exposition immediately). We don’t find out Joey’s tactical background (or another surprise connection) until later, when Detective Sergeant Hume (Ruth Gemmell) arrives on the scene and starts quarterbacking the counter-operation. And we surely don’t know who’s really in charge of the terrorists or what their endgame is until a more fatal agenda emerges and Joey – who’s also ex-Army – has to find a way to save not only the hostages but her brother as well.
If you’re expecting nonstop action and thrills, Cleaner isn’t really that kind of movie. Campbell wants us to hang more on the suspense and timing of the terrorists’ movements and how Joey’s going to get around them. The script wants us to enjoy Joey’s resourcefulness and the lengths to which these terrorists are willing to go, but it also seems to revel in watching corporate bigwigs having their dirty laundry spit back in their faces. Quite a lot of time is spent on their crimes against nature and recording their confessions, which are getting prepared as exhibits to be shown for the world to try and hang them in the court of public opinion. I mean, who wouldn’t want to do something like this? Y’know, without all the hostage-taking and killing?
There’s not even a lot of the kind of cat-and-mouse chasing you’d expect from a movie like this; Joey spends more than the first hour of the movie out the window before she gets back in the building. But when she gets in there, the action kicks into high gear for the final act, and we see Joey in full, lethal effect. Daisy Ridley is at her magnetic best, giving Joey a harried but in-control manner; having her as the film’s linchpin character helps Cleaner go down easy, as her well-honed action movie chops create a good balance of the emotion and kineticism required of her character.
Martin Campbell may not be working with the high-powered budget or casts he had for GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Casino Royale, but he still knows how to make decent thrillers. Cleaner is a perfectly serviceable suspense film that you might find worth viewing on a boring Saturday afternoon. It’s not meant to break any doors down or change the world; a mid-grade actioner never hurt anybody, and it’s a treat to see Daisy Ridley in fight mode and ready to get the job done.
