CLEANER -- Skyscraper Thriller Squanders Solid Set-Up

Review by Daniel Lima

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “A gang of armed terrorists take a high society office party in a skyscraper hostage, but are unaware of a fly in the ointment with a particular set of skills.” Yes, the new Martin Campbell project Cleaner is yet another Die Hard riff. To its credit, it manages to get right parts of that film’s formula many other derivative works do not. Everything else is a spectacular failure.

Daisy Ridley is a former British Army soldier who is down on her luck. On the same day that her autistic brother, played by Michael Tuck, is kicked out of his care home, she is forced to take him to her work… as a window cleaner, the same day of the aforementioned hostage situation. Things go south from there.

If there’s one thing to commend Cleaner for, it handles the setup surprisingly well. The opening scene is a flashback to the siblings’ childhood, with their abusive father putting hands on the brother as young Ridley climbs(!) around her kitchen and sits out on the window. It’s a laughably direct and obvious way to establish the characters’ relationship, past trauma, and foreshadow her pivotal role as someone who hangs onto things at high altitudes. For a lean action-thriller, however, this is also an effective way to announce what to expect: a not-too-serious bit of fun, nevertheless grounded in human emotion.

It helps that Ridley has such an easy rapport with Tuck. She nails the exasperation of someone in her position, trying to get their life together yet forced to look after someone who may always need them. In spite of a role that may on paper dive into popular cliches about autism, Tuck makes his character feel like a human being whose disorder is a part of him without necessarily defining him. The push-pull dynamic between the two is not enumerated on in the script, but their performances tell a shared history, and would have provided a solid foundation for a compelling action yarn.

Unfortunately, Cleaner does not capitalize on that.

Any good Die Hard clone knows that one of the most important aspects is the antagonist. With the cast and setting so limited, much of the story’s drive comes from the nature of the foe set against the fettered hero. Here, an attempt is made to craft a villain who actually has some convincing moral arguments: the terrorists are actually environmental activists, who intend to reveal the environmental damages and assassination of other activists perpetrated by those wealthy and powerful individuals.

Why should we care about the lives of these awful people? As if to answer this, the leader of this group is usurped by an even more militant figure, a self-described anti-humanist (a philosophy that does exist, but not in the form portrayed here) who has no qualms about killing. Unfortunately, this just creates a new problem: the people being targeted are, in their own way, anti-humanists with no qualms about killing. The difference is the terrorists are moral absolutist fatalists, and the bourgeois are motivated solely by profit. Say what you will about the tenets of antihumanism, at least it’s an ethos. The film does attempt broaden out the scope of the threat late in the game, but too late to keep the audience from the side of the activists.

That said, it’s not like the office workers at Nakatomi Plaza were fleshed out and sympathetic. What made Die Hard work was that its hero had a personal stake in stopping the unfolding events. Not only was his wife being held hostage, he was a police officer, and thus had a vested interest in putting an end to criminal wrongdoing. Beyond that, the film is structured in a way that constantly changes the resources both protagonist and antagonist have at their disposal, shifting momentum and who has the upper hand, as well as delivering solid action set pieces.

On paper, Cleaner should be able to manage the same, with Tuck giving Ridley a reason to stop the terrorists, and her military background providing the justification for her ability to run circles around them. The script squanders both of these, leaving Ridley stranded on the side of the building for most of the runtime, unable to affect events in the tower, and never going so far as to actually threaten her brother. Every potential complication is quickly quashed, from an attempt to frame Ridley to trigger-happy police to… well, that’s about it really. An ungodly amount is spent with absolutely nothing changing the stakes, no new developments throwing a monkey wrench into best laid plans. Early on, the villain says to ignore the window cleaner, because she can’t do anything from outside. Incredibly, that turns out to be true.

Towards the end, there are a handful of surprisingly decent fight scenes, intensely physical brawls that have a sense of rhythm, purpose, and direction that reminds the audience that the man at the helm had once reinvented James Bond. These only serve to highlight how meager the rest of Cleaner is. Why not get the protagonist involved early, so she can actually impact the drama? Why not spend more time with the brother, have him more directly in harm’s way to make their relationship more central to the conflict? Why not lean into the complication of a villain who the audience can easily sympathize with, instead of trying to create the most extreme strawman possible? Why not make a more interesting movie?

Cleaner arrives in theater February 21.

Rating: 2.5/5