Here’s a weird fact: Shortly before the tragic events of 9/11, Jackie Chan was in pre-production on an action movie called “Nosebleed,” in which he would have played a window washer fighting terrorists at the World Trade Center. That movie obviously never got made, but the concept has apparently been floating around in the ether, because nearly 25 years later we’ve got “Cleaner,” a “Die Hard” knockoff starring Daisy Ridley as a window washer fighting terrorists on a different skyscraper.
As “Die Hard” knockoffs go, it could be worse.
“Die Hard” knockoffs are their own subgenre, in case you hadn’t noticed, and there sure are a lot of them. The formula is simple: Bad guys take over a specific location, a good guy is trapped in that location with them, and the good guy takes down those bad guys one at a time. In the years that followed John McTiernan’s action classic we’ve seen everything from Die Hard on a Mountain (“Cliffhanger”) to Die Hard on a Bus (“Speed”) to Die Hard in a Hockey Stadium (“Sudden Death”). Eventually Hollywood ran out of ideas and stooped as low to Die Hard on a Building, which barely qualifies as a concept but gave us films like “Skyscraper” and [checks notes] “Skyscraper.” One of them starred Dwayne Johnson. The other one starred Anna Nicole Smith. Yes. Really.
“Cleaner” is the kind of film that goes through the motions, efficiently and effectively, but not excitingly enough to make you forget that other films did it better. Indeed, I’ve spent over two paragraphs now talking about the various movie trivia “Cleaner” reminded me of, since “Cleaner” doesn’t provide much other food for thought. It’s a slick genre exercise but exercise is supposed to get you to a goal. “Cleaner” is a hundred sit-ups and no abs.
Daisy Ridley stars as Jo Locke, a military washout who works as a window washer at a giant building owned by a corrupt energy company run by corrupt assholes. She’s running late for work one day when she gets a call. Her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) has been kicked out of his assisted housing for hacking some computers and exposing the owners’ corruption. This will be important later. Just like the scene where Jo, as a child, climbs around her kitchen without touching the ground. It turns out “The Floor is Lava” is all the training you need to cling to a skyscraper twenty years later.
Jo brings Michael to work so she won’t get fired, but today was “Die Hard” day and nobody told her about it. So eco-terrorists take over a big gala event, use knockout gas on everyone else in the building, and force the billionaires and politicians to admit their complicity in covering up the dangers of climate change. Their leader is played by Clive Owen, who played a similar role in Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” but with a much more effective and elaborate scheme.
Now Jo is trapped on a window washing platform while the “bad guys” (we’ll get to that in a second), who include a dangerous dude with a short fuse named Noah (Taz Skylar, “One Piece”), run amuck. She spends an awful lot of the film out there on that platform, which fiddles with the “Die Hard” knockoff formula just a little bit. How do you stop terrorists in a sky rise when you’re trapped outside the sky rise on a tiny platform two dozen stories into the air?
The answer is “not very well” but Martin Campbell, who directed the action classics “GoldenEye,” “The Mask of Zorro” and “Casino Royale,” knows how to make a lot out of a little. “Cleaner” is a sharply photographed small-scale thriller, briskly edited and with a couple of wince-inducing stunts. Eventually Jo will make it inside and do the conventional action hero thing, which Daisy Ridley is great at, and it’s almost a relief, since the movie we were expecting can finally happen. Then again it’s almost a bummer, since the movie that surprised us just stopped.
The motivation for the bad guys in movies like this isn’t terribly important, no matter how hard “Cleaner” tries to prove otherwise. Indeed, all the film’s efforts to make them sympathetic or at least complicated fall apart eventually. “Cleaner” is the latest in an annoyingly long line of movies in which people who care about climate change are the villains because they’re trying to save the world the wrong way. These movies, like “Hobbs and Shaw” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” make it seem like stopping the people who care about climate change is the most important thing these heroes can do. Stopping actual climate change is irrelevant because these particular environmentalists crossed a line, which is definitely a bad thing, but it doesn’t make climate change any less relevant.
“Cleaner” tries to have a difficult conversation about this, with a villain who emphasizes how hard they tried to save the world the right way before resorting to hackneyed hostage plots. But in the end it all boils down to stopping their immediate threat, with the vague possibility that maybe someday somebody will do something about climate change down the line. It’s just frustrating to see real world, valid issues reduced to b-movie villain motivations without actually doing something productive about their real world, valid concerns. Then again it’s probably too much to ask the writers of a “Die Hard” knockoff to solve all the world’s problems. They could have tried harder but their job was to die harder, possibly with a bit of a vengeance.
The long and short of it is, “Cleaner” is just okay. It’s a three-star trip down “Been There, Done That” lane, and it’s reasonably entertaining. It’s just not entertaining enough to make you stop thinking about all the things the movie doesn’t want you to stop and think about. Like how in a giant building with dozens of stories and four sides, every significant plot point happens around the same floor, near the same windows, on the same side. The odds are incalculable, but at least doing those equations is a fun diversion from this fun diversion.