Every generation gets its own Die Hard. So potent is the power of John McClane that the animated comedy Rick And Morty even devoted an entire episode to Rick imploring his teenage granddaughter to “do a Die Hard” in a space station. We’ve had Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a boat (Speed 2: Cruise Control), Die Hard on a different boat (Under Siege), Die Hard on a train (Under Siege 2), Die Hard in a couple of White Houses (Olympus Has Fallen, White House Down), Die Hard in various planes (Air Force One, Con Air, Executive Decision) etc etc etc. Yet until the arrival of Cleaner, a new ostensibly original homegrown British action movie, we’d never really had a Die Hard in London.
On paper, there is much cause for optimism for Cleaner. The film is directed by veteran filmmaker Martin Campbell, responsible for two of the best James Bond films ever made (GoldenEye and Casino Royale), a director who knows his way around an action set-piece and comes with decades of experience. And it’s led by Daisy Ridley, the brightest talent to emerge from the recent Star Wars sequels, an actor who has made brave, interesting choices (Sometimes I Think About Dying) and demonstrated acting chops (The Young Woman And The Sea) in her post-Rey career.
Leaden with ham-fisted expositional dialogue [...] the film has a perplexing tone that never settles on anything consistent.
Ridley is reliably engaging here, playing Joey, a hard-working window-cleaner having a bad day. There’s a lightness and a sweary charisma to her character which she wears comfortably. When we meet her, Joey is very stressed**:** her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) has been kicked out of his care home, and she’s late for her job mopping the vertiginous glass windows of One Canada Square, one of London’s tallest and therefore most cinematic skyscrapers.
It’s only when she shows up to work that things go full Die Hard. At a big swanky shindig for a Nakatomi-Corporation-by-another-name company, terrorists in scary masks led by the mysterious Marcus (Clive Owen) suddenly start shooting up the place, and Joey — left alone on the side of the building, backdropped by unconvincing green screen — is the only one who can take them on. Or at least, she eventually takes them on, after spending rather a lot of the film shouting loudly through plate-glass windows. This is a film which oddly doesn’t know what to do with its stars, sidelining Ridley for the first hour, and wasting Owen in what is essentially a glorified cameo.
Leaden with ham-fisted expositional dialogue (“No wonder the army kicked you out!”; “You’re a train-wreck too, huh?”), the film has a perplexing tone that never settles on anything consistent. It begins with a harrowing flashback of domestic violence before launching into a bouncy, cheerful pop-music-soundtracked montage. It darts between attempts at tense thrills, goofy humour and distressing darkness. The bad guys are eco-terrorists, which frustratingly leaves you cheering for their cause rather than hissing at them to fail. There are also bizarre running references to Piers Morgan and the plot of Avengers: Endgame.
Only in the last half hour does the Die Hard-iness really ramp up, with chats over the walkie-talkie, bonding with a hard-bitten cop and a very Hans Gruber-esque denouement. Ridley finally gets a chance to be the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass — at one point she beats a guy up with a spanner — but the action feels so slight, especially compared to the ambitious set-pieces of Campbell’s Bond entries. The whole thing just feels a little bit poorly thought out. You will at least, as John McClane might put it, never even think about going up in a tall building again.