Mere minutes into “Cleaner,” Joey (Daisy Ridley) faces a countdown. Catastrophically behind schedule, she microwaves a cup of day-old coffee, burns two pieces of toast, and busses to the London skyscraper where she washes windows, punching in with only seconds to spare.
If “Cleaner” were solely about a millennial’s frantic commute, it could have been the existential slapstick thriller of the season. Alas, director Martin Campbell has other ideas, mostly involving guns, gas, and so many Avengers references that he could be priming Ridley for a Marvel role (don’t do it, Daisy!).
“I need this job!” Joey declares. No one wants to wipe bird poop off of a building, but someone has to—just as Ridley, a “Star Wars” survivor with a taste for the blissfully uncommercial (“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” “Magpie”), occasionally has to star in movies like “Cleaner.”
When Ridley was cast as Rey in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015), she was an obscure British television actress. Her unsettling audition, a reading of a sinister interrogation scene, elevated her above starrier contenders for the part, including Saoirse Ronan.
“Where am I?” Rey asks in the scene. Reading her lines while dressed in distinctly terrestrial turquoise, Ridley didn’t look the part of a Jedi-to-be, but she seemed to know exactly where she was going: into the eye of a blockbuster hurricane in dire need of her effortless humanity.
Ridley’s relatability is present from the first act of “Cleaner,” in which Joey’s brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), speaks admiringly of Piers Morgan, the broadcaster so repugnant that even Donald Trump called him “ruthless, arrogant, evil, and obnoxious.”
“Piers Morgan is an attention-seeking ‘the worst word’!” Joey bellows. I’m not sure what word she’s referring to (knowing Brits, it probably starts with the letter C), but Morgan would have been a more satisfyingly hateful adversary than the film’s actual villains, a posse of pontificating ecoterrorists.
“We’re going to shine a light on your crimes!” Marcus (Clive Owen) announces to a group of energy moguls. Actually, Marcus doesn’t shine a light on anything but his own corpse—he’s shot and killed halfway through the film, presumably so the producers wouldn’t have to pay Owen’s full fee.
Usurping Marcus as the antagonist-in-chief of “Cleaner” is Noah (Taz Skylar), a sniveling brute described as an “anti-humanist terrorist” (he’s either a hardline environmentalist or a guy who really hated reading Kurt Vonnegut in secondary school).
“Do you hate people, Noah?” asks a cop (Ruth Gemmell). “I hate what we’ve done to the world,” Noah replies. Being yet another movie that demonizes anyone who rouses humanity to confront the climate crisis, “Cleaner” at least partly proves his point.
Like Joey, Noah makes a living scrubbing the windows of the Shard, the tallest building in the United Kingdom. It’s the perfect cover for his plot to torment the dastardly executives who Joey, an ex-British Army soldier, attempts to rescue with a little John McClane mimicry.
“Cleaner” is so indebted to “Die Hard” (1989) that I half expected Joey to shout, “Yippee-ki-yay, tree hugger!” When she’s suspended outside the Shard, the film is “Die Hard” on the side of a building; when she’s inside, it’s “Die Hard” in a building. If that passes for originality, what’s next? “Speed” on a bus?
Like a bullet in a concrete wall, “Die Hard” has proved difficult to extract from the zeitgeist. That’s partly because it’s about more than a hostage crisis: It’s about a man having a hysterical meltdown because he believes that big government, globalization, the media, and women’s lib are nuking the nuclear family.
In place of the grotesquely reactionary convictions of “Die Hard,” “Cleaner” substitutes a craven non-conviction: that environmentalism is worse than the climate crisis because it attracts psychopaths like Noah, who mocks Joey for siding with law enforcement against his organization, Earth Revolution.
“Helping the pigs? That’s a new low for you,” he sneers. This is what we’re paying for: to be pacified by entertainment featuring agents of change so vile and violent that we will cling to the coziness of corruption for dear life.
“Cleaner” concludes with an intriguing denouement intimating that Joey is more progressive than she appears, but that doesn’t redeem the film’s failings as a political allegory—or its inability to fulfill Campbell’s stated promise of “a stomach-churning, vertiginous experience.”
As Joey clambered up the Shard, I pined for the brutal parkour battle that Campbell unleashed in “Casino Royale” (2006). He may have roused James Bond from a Cold War coma, but “Cleaner” is so joyless and weightless that it leaves MI6 with only one option: to confiscate Campbell’s license to thrill.
His majesty’s secret service will have to act quickly, since Ridley and Campbell are already planning their next collaboration: “Dedication,” an action thriller about a marine who battles an “anarchist leader” named Omar Romantas and his son, Bento. Oh dear.
In “Dedication,” Ridley’s character “proves her worth in a relentless battle that will define her legacy,” according to Variety. Personally, I’m more interested in how Campbell’s legacy will be defined—and whether Ridley will ultimately build a legacy worth defining.
