Martin Campbell’s Cleaner sets out to recapture the magic of the director’s two James Bond films, 1995’s GoldenEye and 2006’s Casino Royale, by engaging with ripped-from-the-headlines issues while also basking in the ostensibly reassuring warmth of a Cold War-era franchise blockbuster formula. Here the issues are climate change and radical activism, and the formula is a distinctly Die Hard-grade concoction.
John McClane facsimile Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley) is an ex-military window cleaner who ends up dangling from the London headquarters of the ethically dubious Agnian Energy corporation while an investors gala is taken over by eco-terrorists. Trapped inside the skyscraper is her autistic adult brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), who is, of course, a brilliant computer hacker annoyingly obsessed with the MCU (he carries a rubber Thor hammer in public and namedrops Kevin Feige in casual conversation). We also get two Hans Grubers: terrorist leader Marcus (Clive Owen), an old-fashioned leftist who demands that his VIP hostages confess their environmentally destructive and corrupt dealings to the public, and an underling, Noah (Taz Skylar), who believes in an “anti-humanist” approach to climate justice.
As in 2017’s The Foreigner, Campbell seems drawn to the idea that a sclerotic status quo will result in a bloodthirsty and nihilistic generation of radical resistance militants. It’s a well-founded observation, but like in that film, the theme competes for space among narrative threads that feel clumsily connected to one another, such as the presence of the tough-as-nails superintendent played by Ruth Gemmell who tries to control the situation while maintaining a wisecracking rapport over the radio with Joey, her improvisational woman on the inside.
A blunt, linear unspooling of Joey’s traumatic upbringing and relationship with Michael dominates the first act, only for her perspective to fade into the background as the hostage plot takes hold and Ridley spends much of Cleaner’s midsection trapped on a window-cleaning scaffold watching events unfold on the other side of a pane of glass. Just as the terrorists’ infighting seems poised to steal the narrative, it’s back to Joey’s personal journey through a rollercoaster of technically competent but unmemorable action set pieces—far too many of them clashes in shadowy gray maintenance rooms—as she and the cops take the bad guys down.
One of the film’s biggest disappointments is its distinctly uncreative use of the skyscraper’s architecture and how little it does with the inside-outside perspective that’s embedded in its premise. Cleaner dodders on by hitting the mechanical beats of a flick that might have spent a month or two on top of the DVD rental shelves in the twilight years of Blockbuster Video, which makes it lame in sort of a nostalgic way, but it’s lame nevertheless.
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