Cleaner

• Directed by Martin Campbell
• February 21, 2025 (US) / May 2, 2025 (UK)

Environmental activists hijack a corporate gala while planning mass murder as a message to the world with an ex-soldier-turned-window-cleaner fighting back. That sounds like a comedy, but it is just a laughable plot description!

I heard about Cleaner and in full disclosure I hadn’t heard anything very good about this Die Hard clone. I decided to watch it mostly out of curiosity. Not necessarily was I hate watching but instead viewing to see if it lived it down to everything everybody was saying. I guess that’s the right way to put it.

Joanna ‘Joey’ Locke (Daisy Ridley) works at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf as a window cleaner where she is perpetually late and often belligerent to her douchebag boss (Gavin Fleming). They clearly dislike each other and though I am ignorant of British labor laws it strikes me that her boss might have enough grounds to terminate her based on very shoddy attendance. How does she keep her job? You can occasionally run afoul of the important people but when they clearly are upset at you over something AND do not like you I’m sure they would make moves to terminate you.

Joey has an older autistic brother that is also an online anti-corruption crusader named Michael (Matthew Tuck) who she keeps putting in facility after facility because he keeps getting kicked out of because of his activities. In the opener he is once again kicked out of a place so Joey brings him to work until she can make arrangements. Super convenient for the purposes of the plot.

The small and very slight Joey was once in the British SRR making her super well skilled to take on all sorts of baddies especially if they took over a company’s pretentious party. This uses just about everything from Die Hard in broad strokes without the Christmas party. What it misses is John McClane was a so-so cop who stepped up to the challenge. Joey is an awesome soldier that needs to just decide to be awesome.

Agnian Energy Company is headquartered in the building and is run by people positioning the company as environmentally friendly when it really is not. Enter the members of Earth Revolution and Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) who take over the party in an effort to expose Agnian’s hypocrisy because nobody would even think a global corporation might be slinging bull to keep profits going. Marcus’s whole idea is to have the members of the bored, er, board confess to their environmental crimes.

Clive Owen is the most famous and probably most talented member of the cast and he gets 15 minutes or less worth of screen time as an actual character before getting knocked off by the character of Noah (Taz Skylar) that takes a decidedly more violent and less friendly to people approach to hostages or even society.

Superintendent Claire Hume (Ruth Gemmell) gets put in charge once the London police get involved. She cuts out all others on the force and hangs the whole operation on a window cleaner that she doesn’t know who fired on locals at the behest of the terrorists to protect those inside but didn’t hit anybody. I have two problems with that. First all she has on Joey is a file and a look at her social media. The second is that this individual (Joey) despite looking good on paper and social media did fire on people and Hume doesn’t know Joey personally to hang so much on her.

The conversations the two have border on “You go girl!” and “You’re a strong, independent woman, girl!” But worse they bring everything to a crawl as Hume trusts Joey for no clear reason. Her view of Joey is decidedly positive and faithful despite little to actually justify it. Any excitement or tension built is dragged down as they verbally hi five each other as if they were best buds.

Fortunately for the purposes of plot Joey’s brother Michael is an expert hacker and happens to be in the building at the right moment in order to help her steal files so she has some leverage over Noah in the climax. This plan is dumped on the audience with Joey using the Avengers and the Infinity Stones to explain it to her brother. Was that even necessary? He seems together enough to be able to explain it without shoehorning in a pop-culture reference.

These are environmentalists kidnapping a bunch of people and killing them at random to save the environment. Is this anti or pro environmental movement? Does Martin Campbell or anybody making this movie even know? For an action movie, Cleaner is very boring. For a movie with a message, it’s confused. For a movie that is supposed to have some emotion, it’s indifferent to so much.

When the movie tries to get deep, it’s much more of a lecture than it is a discussion. Nothing wrong with a film having a point of view or even a message but when it lectures or nags you into taking its stance, it’s not that engaging. In those instances it’s a message with a movie and not a movie with a message.

Campbell and pals go out of their way to frame these ecoterrorists as being right but they’re just not going about it the right way. They even partially mitigate taking hostages. They just shouldn’t have killed anybody. What? By the credits Joey accomplishes the goals of Earth Revolution but without killing and it’s all okay. Everybody is really on the same side here. I’m not sure who the hero or the villain really is supposed to be. One just wanted the end results in a bloodier fashion than the other. Noticeable philosophical differences are necessary for sides in a dramatic conflict. Here there are virtually none.

The most grievous sin is Daisy Ridley in the lead. She doesn’t have the physical presence or the acting chops to carry an action movie. She’s too small in build to be able to physically beat up individuals larger than her which happens here. Her performance doesn’t have that gravitas that makes you want to see her kick more butt or care about her character’s survival or success.

With very little action and a heavy amount of talking and no real focus on who the bad guys or the good guys are Cleaner is just not good. Not everybody can carry a film. This is the second non-Star Wars movie that I’ve seen featuring Daisy Ridley and maybe she should just make a career out of being a supporting actress because carrying a movie is not for her.

Or just do a better movie.