Retro Cleaner is a Satisfyingly Silly B-Grade Die Hard Clone
For a Die Hard wannabe directed by James Bond (Goldeneye, Casino Royale) and Zorro (The Mask of Zorro) hit-maker Martin Campbell starring a bona fide Jedi (Daisy Ridley) as the heroine and featuring the one and only Clive Owen as the charismatic villainous force who sets a series of catastrophic events into motion, Cleaner knows what it’s doing. This tale of a high-rise window cleaner with a secretive past who is the only hope for a building full of hostages when a band of eco-terrorists crashes a celebratory gala doesn’t skimp on the silly while still offering up solid lo-fi thrills and chills along the way.
Joey (Ridley) is a former British soldier who left the service under mysterious circumstances with a penchant for heights. Since exiting the military she has worked as a window cleaner for Agnian Energy, a supposedly “Green Energy” company that’s been garnering an increasingly larger share of the world market over the past few years, seemingly overnight.
During a moonlit event on the top floor of the company’s luxurious downtown London corporate headquarters, a team of eco-terrorists led by the notorious Marcus Blake (Owen) takes everyone in the building hostage. They want Agnian’s billionaire owners Gerald (Lee Boardman) and Geoffrey Milton (Rufus Jones) — along with several other of the party’s famous and influential guests — to make public statements that they’ve been clandestinely polluting the environment to increase their company’s profit margins. If they don’t? Marcus’ second-in-command Noah (Taz Skylar) won’t be at all shy about setting off a series of explosives that will kill every single person inside the skyscraper.
It all follows a standard template. Joey is trapped outside hanging precariously from a damaged window washing rig and is initially suspected of being one of the terrorists before the special agent in charge (Ruth Gemmell) realizes otherwise and then subsequently trusts her to do the impossible. Noah is a raging psychotic who isn’t as concerned with the planet’s ecological survival as he is in making a big, bold statement covered in human blood and guts. Joey even has an added personal connection that makes her extra determined to do whatever it takes to stop this group of cutthroats, her autistic, tech-savvy brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) hiding somewhere in the building.
There are multiple thorny elements here, most of which give the film a vaguely late 1990s feel where you could toy around with “bad taste” aspects as long as you kept the pace fast, the action electric, the characters semi-interesting, and never allowed the material to take itself too seriously. Fortunately, that’s what happens in this instance. As far as Die Hard clones go, Cleaner is far more reminiscent of Under Siege (or rather Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, if I’m being honest) or Passenger 57 than it is Speed, and that’s fine by me.
Credit for this has to go to Campbell. While hardly his best work, his directorial skill is never in doubt. This is an efficient filmmaker who knows how to stage even the most rudimentary of action set pieces with fervent aplomb. There is an old-school crispness to his filmmaking that I found refreshing. Working in confident tandem with director of photography Eigil Hansen and editor Jim Page, Campbell manufactures a tidy visual framework for all of the explosive and high-flying carnage to take place within. There’s nothing spectacular about any of it, but there also does not need to be. Sometimes a clean, crisp point-of-view is all that’s required for the action choreography to pop, and that’s the case in this instance.
I could have done with less Skylar (his raving lunatic isn’t interesting) and more Owen (phoning it in for an easy paycheck, but still doing so with style, class, and razor-sharp intensity), but that’s not nearly as problematic as it could have been. What’s more uncomfortable is how the screenplay paints the eco-terrorists as the baddies. While I have no issue with them being the villains, there are moments where it feels like the entire film is saying all climate activism is bad and that we should leave all decisions regarding the environment to corporations, politicians, and billionaires. While I’m certain this is not intentional, that so little time is spent examining or discussing the topic this is frustratingly how it all ended up feeling to me.
Thankfully, I do not find this to be a dealbreaker. I was still entertained. Ridley makes for an appealing action hero, there are some terrific suspense sequences of Joey precariously dangling from the outside the Agnian building, and the final confrontation between equally skilled adversaries has a kinetic B-grade charm I found satisfying. Cleaner understands the retro action-thriller assignment, and that’s what ultimately matters the most. This goofy actioner is way more fun than it arguably has any right to be.
Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)
