Cleaner Film review: Needs Cleaning Up

Cleaner wastes some good actors, a fine director and a meagre budget on a script that shamelessly rips off Die Hard at every turn.

That extends to the cast and crew; there’s just no passion or energy to anyone’s efforts here.

To be fair to the filmmaking team behind Cleaner, you gotta make bank. For example, after years of exploring galaxies far, far away, Daisy Ridley has segued into more interesting smaller-scale fare, like Sometimes I Think About Dying and Young Woman and the Sea. These are a long way from Star Wars, so a lead in an action movie makes sense in a ‘one for them, one for me’ kind of way. She plays Joey, an army veteran who scales London skyscrapers to clean windows. A rushed prologue sees her younger self climbing out her window in the Trellick tower block to escape her father’s violence, but this is not enough to justify the immediate jump to ‘20 Years Later’. Young Joey has now grown up to be the erstwhile Rey Skywalker, with a cropped hairdo and tattoos substituted in for a developed backstory of her army career. 

Three credited screenwriters gut their work of any interiority for the sake of efficiency. The fact that one of them, Paul Andrew Williams, wrote the effective likes of The Cottage and London To Brighton, only piles on the disappointment. What little development Joey gets comes in the form of her brother Michael (Matthew Tuck), an autistic young man whom the script presents as a needy idiot savant. Tuck is sweet in the role, but his potentially offensive characterisation renders his efforts moot. He’s freshly kicked out of his care home and has to tag along with Joey to her work, but no doubt his hacking skills will come in handy, and his bond with Joey will force some strained emotions. 

At least this Die Hard knockoff doesn’t resort to stereotypes in portraying its villains, but Cleaner feels like such a pastiche of early ‘90s action dreck that it probably should have, in order to claim some kind of satirical edge. Joey is working on the Canary Wharf headquarters of an energy firm when ecological extremists infiltrate the company’s gala dinner, taking everyone hostage. The terrorists are led by Clive Owen, another actor capable of far better, presumably cursing his agent while exhaling his lines through clenched teeth. In one of the film’s stranger decisions, Owen isn’t even in the film that much, opting to let his second-in-command (Taz Skylar) do most of the scenery-chewing.

Even though we’ve seen this kind of setup before onscreen, Cleaner never takes advantage of the potential thrills on offer. The film is barely over 90 minutes long, but Ridley’s Joey spends far too much of that just dangling from a suspended scaffold on the side of the building, too far away from proceedings to get pulses going with the prospect of fighting some baddies. Too much time is wasted on her trying to get the attention of the cops; her long-distance communications with superintendent Hume (Ruth Gemmell) lack the chemistry of Bruce Willis and Reginald VelJohnson. The only possible source of tension is the potential for trouble in the ranks of the terrorists, but any twists or turns in the narrative can’t jumpstart the film when it has no compelling story at its core.

Whether due to funding issues or disinterest, Campbell cannot manifest one interesting moment of action in the whole film. Cleaner is awash with obvious greenscreen backgrounds, stuntmen replacing actors and unimaginative setpieces, slogging along to its inevitable denouement. You’ve probably already imagined how that goes, and you’re absolutely right. Cleaner knocks on the door of ‘so bad it’s good’ territory. It’s sufficiently silly and cheap, but it’s not incoherent. Campbell and his crew worked with what they had, namely a poor script and nowhere near enough money to make it look good. Beer and low expectations might help it go down easy.

Cleaner will be released in US theatres on and in UK & Irish cinemas on