Daisy Ridley polishes up this dreary Die Hard knock-off.
Somewhere between the 37th floor and the 96-minute runtime, Cleaner realises it doesn’t actually have anything to say – it just knows what it wants to sound like. Corporate corruption, climate activism, social media radicalisation, neurodiversity representation: it’s a search engine’s dream of relevance, duct-taped to a serviceable skyscraper siege and fronted by Daisy Ridley doing all the heavy lifting, at times quite literally.
Ridley plays Joey Locke, a disgraced soldier turned contract window cleaner working One Canada Square the night eco-activists storm a corporate gala and take 300 hostages. Their demands are a blur of buzzwords and half-digested ideology, delivered with the solemnity of a manifesto and the coherence of a comments thread. Unfortunately for them, Joey’s on the outside of the building when the lockdown starts, and she’s the only one with the resolve, resourcefulness, and conveniently specific trauma to stop them. Bridgerton’s Ruth Gemmell also pops up, trading in corsetry and courtly restraint for the weary pragmatism of a high-ranking Met officer trying to keep a lid on the situation from the outside.
Clive Owen arrives late and exits even earlier – his screen time is barely long enough for him to pick up his paycheque – but his brief presence is a tonal sleight of hand. He seems set up to be the puppet master, only to be dispatched five minutes in, clearing the stage for Taz Skylar’s smirking lieutenant to take over as antagonist. Skylar has the snarl down, but the film gives him little to play with beyond some glib one-liners and twitchy menace, wasting his potential.
Ridley, though, keeps the thing anchored. There’s no wink to the camera, no tongue in cheek – just a grim, credible focus. Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker showed Ridley’s steely determination to her craft: no matter how poor the material, she will show up and put in the hard graft, and she does so again here in Cleaner. Her action beats feel lived-in and physical (performing the majority of her own stunts), and there’s a welcome refusal to smooth off Joey’s edges or soften her with smart quips or wry self-commentary.
Cleaner is a stripped-down, single-location actioner that wants to channel Die Hard with a social conscience, but its political convictions are as authentic as Hans Gruber’s concern for The Asian Dawn or Liberté de Québec. There’s zero subtlety here, no nuance to the villainy and nothing but contrived and convenient curricula vitae in place of actual characters. For all the talk of disruption and corporate rot, the film can’t quite decide if it wants to sympathise with the insurgents or scold them. It flirts with moral greyness, then colours everything in broad strokes by the final act.
The setup is functional and Campbell knows it, but it’s genuinely surprising how disengaged he seems from his own material. This is the director who twice rebooted Bond and put the snap back in Zorro‘s whip, yet here the camera moves like it’s checking its watch and the action staging never rises above the perfunctory. Everything is soaked in a lugubrious blue tint that reads less like style and more like a desperate attempt to lend seriousness to a premise constantly teetering on the edge of the absurd. I know it’s a Sky Original movie but does it need to be so…well, televisual?
Cleaner isn’t entirely without merit. It’s compact and unpretentious about its basic nature but it keeps brushing up against the idea of saying something important, and then backing off before it risks committing. It wants the immediacy of a trending topic, the pulse of a thriller, and the emotional weight of a character study, but only manages fragments of each. What remains is watchable but ephemeral, like the last few streaks of soap suds on the window before the squeegee makes its final pass.
