Once again we find ourselves dipping our toe into the shallow end of the pool marked “female led action movie that’s premiered on streaming” with both our fingers crossed in the vain hope that someone – anyone – can give us an entry that’s isn’t insanely frustrating. However, after casting an eye over the vital statistics of Cleaner, the lastest attempt to give us a femme flavoured fracas that actually sticks, things for a second there actually looked like they were looking up. Obviously the synopsis was pure bobbins (Die Hard with a window cleaner), but the presence of Daisy Ridley (Jedi credentials whether you like it or not) and Martin Campbell (successfully rebooted Bond – twice) meant that my intrest was peaked just buy the sheer randomness alone.
Will my hopes be dashed like so much bird shit splattered on a window 51 floors up, or will this movie take other lady led actioner to the fucking cleaners?
Without any further ado, we are introduced to Joey, a scrappy young woman whose life has seemed to fall apart at regular intervals ever since childhood. After surviving an abusive childhood that saw her father beat her autistic brother, Michael, out of sheer ignorance, she later crashed out of joining the army by physically attacking a bully and then quitting before she could be discharged. These days she makes her living working as a window cleaner at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, scraping splattered birds of windows and desperately hoping that her smart mouth and her tardiness doesn’t get her fired. However, life adds another speed bump when Michael is kicked out of his most recent care home as he used his formidable computer hacking skills to unearth their corruption and Joey finds herself having to juggle her fussing brother and her bosses who seemingly are aching to shit-can her.
Leaving Michael in the lobby while she works her shift with her mate, Noah, Joey strains to get through her shift in order to figure out what to do next when fate deals yet another metaphorical boot to the lady garden. While a snazzy party is being held onsite for the Agnian Energy Company to clap themselves on the back for their green policies, eco-terrorists led by the suave Markus Blake crash the do in order to expose the hypocrisy that the company is actually hiding in a non-fatal hostage situation.
However, when one of Blake’s underlings stages a surprise coup in order to really cause some damage, things go from bad to lethal and for the entire time, Joey is stuck out on the side of the building, helplessly watching as things go tits up. But with Michael in peril, she tries to change the outcome with any first chance she gets and as the police amass below, Joey realises that if she’s going to save the day, she’ll need to get inside and start serving a multistorey beat down.
So, unfortunately streaming have delivered yet another woman-led action dud that trades in originality for excitement in ways that left me genuinely annoyed; but before you assume I’m about to jump on a certain bandwagon, there are aspects about Cleaner that I did take time to appreciate. The first is Daisy Ridley who despite her casting as a salt-of-the-earth window cleaner (surely as big a leap as asking us to accept Keira Knightley working in a Liverpudlian slaughterhouse), manages to bring a surprising amount of likable energy to her tomboy tole despite being inexplicably clad in Shia LaBouf’s The Strokes t-shirt from Transformers and wielding an accent clear out of Eastenders. While her excessive tough-talking potty-mouth sounds a little forced at times – she often resembles one of those viral videos where parents have allowed their toddlers to swear – she holds the movie well, excels in the fluid fight sequences (when they actually happen – more on that later) and us something of a refreshing fuck up in a time where female action heroes have to be virtually characterless badasses with no flaws other than a traumatic back story.
Also, it may still continually depress me to see how far Martin Campbell, the man who made Goldeneye, Casino Royale and The Mask Of Zorro has slipped down the action director food chain, he makes sure that Cleaner looks slick and does manage to cut loose during the final reel with his usual brand of tactile set pieces and easy to follow brawls.
The real problem here is the script which not only thieves voraciously from the original Die Hard in terms of its setting, but even pinches the trope of our hero having a friendly voice on the ground which acts as a lifeline when things get rough. However, there’s an argument to be made that in some ways, Cleaner doesn’t ape John McClane’s finest hour enough, because in a staggering display of plotting ineptitude, Ridley isn’t actually given the chance to tustle with the terrorists first hand until 25 minutes before the end. In fact, scratch that, when you take into account that Cleaner has around ten minutes of end credits, technically our lead character only has 15 minutes of whuppin’ ass. The rest of the film literally has her trapped outside of the building for the majority of the film trying to figure out a way in. Now, while this could have been used as an excellent way to build extra tension by having your lead dangling above the city streets, stranded higher than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s sailor hat, somehow the potential vertigo just doesn’t translate into anything more than just mild annoyance which is extra weird when you figure in that Campbell once made Vertical Limit, a movie based entirely around long drops.
Worse yet, due to a plot twist that occurs around of the third of the way through, main baddie Clive Owen is suddenly deposed by a far more ruthless, yet far more forgettable foe who then proceeds to cull has own ranks, thereby killing more of the terrorists than Joey does which sort of thwarts many of Daisy’s earnest efforts to provide us with a credible action hero. Still, while the movie tends use other well worn tropes (it’s the second movie with an autistic computer whizz I’ve seen in rapid succession), but the McClane/Powell relationship Ridley has with Ruth Gemmell’s Superintendent actually manages to create some interesting bonding.
However, it’s nowhere near enough to fix the towering (pun intended) issue that the film spends most of its time sidelining it’s lead literally behind a pane of glass leaving her to watch and neglecting to make it a suitable replacement for having her cat and mouse her way through a cluster of terrorists. Props do have to be given to Ridley action star bid, because when the film actually gives her a chance to slip the leash, she enjoyably commits. However she and Campbell are constantly hamstrung by a script that stubbornly refuses to let either of them go nuts and that’s annoyingly let originality get off at the ground floor.
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