Cleaner

dir: Martin Campbell

2025

Like I said, I sometimes like watching trash…

I have seen the same movie two nights in a row! Not literally the same movie, but literally the same genre, being Die Hard but with some permutation. Yesterday it was Die Hard but with an African-American woman as President saving the day. Today it was Die Hard but it’s the window cleaner who saves the day.

And what a day to save… Eco terrorists take over the building where an energy company, long known to be amongst the nicest and most ecologically sympathetic of companies, is lauding itself as a beacon of profitability and sustainability.

The company has been, you know, polluting the earth, murdering activists, convincing the British government to pass legislation that outlaws peaceful protest, but it’s the terrorists who are the bad guys? What’s happened to our collective moral compass?

Of course I am joking. When their leader takes off his mask, I gasped, because Clive Owen was playing the leader of the environmental activists. I gasped because I was surprised to see him. All those years ago he played a similar role (ish, in that he was the leader of a group of bank robbers in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, who was ethical and sensitive and all that crap), and it felt like something of an in joke.

His plan, and that of most of the people with him, seems to be to record the high ups at the company confessing to their many and varied crimes on camera, and then publish it on the internet, as if that would make a lick of fucking difference or even impact on their share prices at all.

At All. If anything it would make their stocks skyrocket. “CEO admits they kill activists and whistleblowers”. Things being as they currently are in the States they’d probably make him the head of the Treasury, as long as he promises to bludgeon people to death with tariffs.

Clive Owen is so great that you miss him, and you wonder “what the fuck has he been doing all these years?” If you’re like me, and gods let’s hope not, you might be trying to think of the last cool flick or show you saw him in, and you might come up blank. If you want to feel old, let me remind you that the masterful Children of Men came out in 2006.

It’s nearly twenty years old. And then you think “wasn’t he going to play James Bond at some stage?” I guess it helps that they got the director for this flick, being Martin Campbell, who made two of the best of the modern Bonds, being GoldenEye and Casino Royale. But no, Clive Owen is too old in this ageist business to play a superspy who beds beauties from Venice to Vladivostok. It’s all grandads and quaint codger detectives now.

As for seeing him here, well, don’t get too attached is all I can say. He is abruptly usurped by someone who is a little bit more extreme in his thinking. Sure, he wants revenge against the fossil fuel companies, but he also wants to kill everyone. Like, absolutely everyone on the planet, and he wants to start with everyone in this building.

Who is going to stand up to this eco-activism gone insane? Well, it’s down to Joey (Daisy Ridley), an ex-army fuck up who cleans the windows of this shining edifice that stands as a tribute to late-stage capitalism. She happens to be on the outside of the building when the terrorists take over, and there she will stay for an hour before the action really kicks in.

That might seem like a counter-productive way to structure such a flick, but I thought it was fine. It allows for an escalation, a feeling of the situation getting worse and worse, that increases some tension before she relieves that tension by killing all the people that are annoying her. She’s been stuck out there for hours. It was probably cold. I mean, it is set in London.

She also has a connection to someone on the inside, someone at risk: by force of circumstance she had to bring her brother to work with her, and Michael (Matthew Tuck) is something of a handful. It seems like he’s mostly been in care due to his support needs (the character is portrayed as being autistic), and being trapped in a building with a bunch of terrorists seems like it could be a bit triggering.

Thankfully, he has a replica of Mjolnir, being Thor’s hammer from the Marvel movies, and a bunch of references that will delight audiences with their nerdy glamour, and I’ll daresay the siblings help each other in crucial moments and reaffirm their commitment and love for each other before the film ends.

And it also foreshadows, at least the finale of Avengers Endgame does, how Joey is going to solve the dilemma of dealing with the new terrorist group’s leader who has a deadman switch on his wrist that will activate all the explosives if his heartbeat stops.

Daisy Ridley does fine in the action-y role. I mean, if she can play a jedi, she can play a window cleaner who wants to protect her brother and take out the bad guys and bad girls. She has been in a bit of a strange ghetto for a number of years, as if she has to pay penance for playing a female jedi in a series of films that the most vocal and presumably smelliest and least likely to argue in good faith section of the fandom is still not over the fact that she somehow ruined these films that they wish were as good as the movies they remember when they were eight years of age.

Last year she played a depressed isolated strange person in a movie that I really liked for most of the film’s length, except with the disappointment of an unearned ending, but in retrospect I’ve gone back to that film a number of times, thinking of it beyond what the script gave her to perform and us to deal with as the audience. Sometimes I Think About Dying was a film I enjoyed watching because she did the least amount of acting possible, because the character needed that. Many actors can’t do that. I guess I was also obsessed with the film because of the lush musical score by Dabney Morris, which I’ve listened to too many times since then.

I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the score in this flick, but this requires her to do maximalist action star acting, which is a fair bit of fight choreography, shooting people in the face when you have to, and making smart arse comments and heartfelt pledges in between swearing to kill the motherfucker who has it coming. She does all that perfectly fine. She’s a great lead that can carry a film, especially one as formulaic as this one.

It’s actually nice to see her in such a role. I don’t want to mope all of the time, so seeing her kick arse against environmental activists is a pleasure to behold. Even if this sounds like a flick with a massive budget, I would guess that it’s not a tenth of the G20 that I saw yesterday with Viola Davis as the lead. Of course however many hundreds they spent on that flick, most of it should have gone to Viola Davis just for getting her arms so buff, and also because she’s a multiple Oscar winner and one of the most acclaimed actors of her generation.

No-one’s tripping over themselves to give Daisy her flowers, but she’s strong in this. It’d be great to see her in some spy thrillers or Black Doves or Slow Horses, though she’s probably too competent-seeming for the latter.

I thoroughly enjoyed this flick (sober), and think it is slightly stronger, better plotted than the other flick I keep referring to. They’re both clichéd, they both try to update their shtick in order to seem contemporary (with cryptobros and Extinction Rebellion type references), they’re both implausible but they both try to find ways to keep us engaged, and for my money Cleaner is the way better of the two.

7 times always be polite to the cleaners, because they’re always the hardest working people in any building out of 10

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“Greedy, needy, cocky. We’re going to shine a light on your crimes” – if only - Cleaner