The shadow cast by 1988’s seminal action-thriller “Die Hard” remains so immense that almost 40 years later, movies continue copying the formula. Movies like “Cleaner,” directed by Martin Campbell who in 1988 helmed “Defenseless” starring Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman and which I didn’t even know existed until this very moment. The cleaner in this case is not a Winston Wolf-type making problems go away but an actual cleaner, a window washer, that is, named Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley). A window washer, yes, but also a dishonorably discharged ex-British special forces and boy, won’t that come in handy? Indeed, she’s washing the windows of London’s third tallest building when it happens to be taken hostage, leaving her stranded outside. It’s “Die Hard” on a suspended platform, in other words, which is a fair to middling remix as these things go. In a brief prologue, we see adolescent Joey avoiding her abusive father by climbing out the window and onto a high ledge, foreshadowing a life washing windows, I guess, which was just kooky enough in its semi-origin story sensation to make me hope “Cleaner” knew what it was doing.
The dramatic urgency with which “Cleaner” begins gave me some hope too. Joey is trying to help her autistic brother Michael out of a jam, which makes her late to work, which causes her unhappy boss to keep her working into the night, and is why she’s out on that suspended platform during the shareholder meeting of the ostensibly well-meaning energy company for which she works when all the higher-ups are taken hostage by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) and his team of environmental radicals. Unlike Hans Gruber, however, a common, nay, exceptional thief who cited the Nakatomi Corporation’s greed but only sought to pilfer it, Marcus is out to plum expose that greed to the rest of the world and make them answer for it. It’s evocative of our current movie world. Where the Third Reich once made for standard-issue villains, now it’s the one percent, with some notes of climate change thrown in, a motivational stew made more intriguing by the ideas of violent v non-violent protest that are innately raised. Innately if briefly. In ways I won’t reveal, the three-person screenplay yanks the tablecloth out from under this set-up and reorients it as a far more straightforward action-thriller.
And fair enough. “Cleaner” scales its dramatic obstacles with more professional propulsion than this year’s similar “G20,” at least. Campbell, though, never truly exploits the Looney Tunes-like set-up of his main character dangling from the side of One Canada Square for half the movie. And though “Cleaner” raises the idea that Joey is as much on the side of the activists cum terrorists as she is on the side of law and justice, the screenplay throws too much water on the former, undermining the sensation of her complicated allegiances and ruining the ostensible surprise ending. It also means the pent-up rage Ridley plays the part with has nowhere to go. Or, virtually nowhere to go. The action scenes are oddly terse, as if they were merely meant to punctuate more grave matters, except those grave matters, as stated, are muted, so there’s nothing to punctuate. And yet. One brief sequence of hand-to-hand combat between Ridley and stuntperson cum actor Melissa Humler as one of the terrorists proves truly magnificent. It feels physical and real and like something is at stake in a way the rest of the movie never quite manages.