Cleaner (2025): A Review (Review #1945)

CLEANER

Have you ever wondered what Die Hard would have been like if it had been Jane McClane instead of John McClane? Well, wonder no more, for we have Cleaner. A disposable effort at an action film that probably would not have worked with a male lead, Cleaner is something that works best if it used as background noise for daily tasks.

Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley) is an ex-British military trooper who has been dishonorably discharged. She is also struggling to make ends meet with her job as a high-rise window washer. As if that was not enough, Joey also has to deal with her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck). He has been kicked out of his ninth placement home the same way that she was kicked out of the army. Michael, who needs a reassuring squeeze and his charger, has only Joey and his Thor's hammer to keep him safe.

Joey manages to arrive at her work late and having to lug Michael around until she can find another placement home. She has no friend in her boss but an ally in her fellow window cleaner Noah (Taz Skylar). They must complete work before the energy conglomerate Agnian Energy hosts a lavish soiree for their biggest stockholders and various government and media elite.

Little do they know that the shindig will be crashed by members of the radical environmental group Earth Revolution, headed by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen). The building has been made impenetrable, with the various protections disabled. As such, no one initially thinks of a lone window cleaner stuck outside the building. However, they did not count on Joey Locke.

Earth Revolution also did not count on a coup, where Noah ends up taking control of the group under his real name of Lukas Santos. He will force the Agnian Energy heads, the Milton Brothers, along with the other guests, to confess their various environmental crimes and then blow the building up. Joey, determined to rescue her brother and by extension everyone else, must use all her skills to bring down these anti-humanist terrorists. Only Superintendent Claire Hume (Ruth Gemmell), who is overseeing the police response, can help her from the ground. Will Joey be able to defeat the radical environmentalists and save the day?

Cleaner has one of the most deceptive trailers that I have seen. I was surprised to see that Clive Owen somehow found himself in this schlock. However, as it has been pointed out to me, the man has to earn a living and eat. While Owen may not have had the career that I think many expected him to in terms of being a big-name star, he has in retrospect not been without respectable work albeit in smaller projects.

Now, here he is in something where he deliciously devours the screen. However, in what will be a spoiler alert, do not get accustomed to having Owen's Marcus as the major antagonist. The Cleaner trailer suggests that it will be a battle between Marcus and Joey. In the film itself, Marcus is killed off in essentially a coup by Noah, who is more radical than Marcus in his determination to exterminate his opponents. "It's not a revolution. It's a reckoning," Noah/Lukas tells the dying Marcus.

From my perspective, Cleaner is a bait-and-switch when it comes to Clive Owen. The film used his name to suggest he played a larger role than he ended up playing. I suppose suggesting to an audience that Clive Owen, even in a hammy performance, will be more of a draw than Taz Skylar would be. 

I do not think that Cleaner was going to have dramatic performances. As such, I did not mind too much that Owen and Skylar were a bit hammy as the terrorists. It does bother me a bit in that even in something as dumb as Cleaner, director Martin Campbell could not get his actors to play this a more serious manner. I think Tuck did his best as Michael, the autistic brother, as he did not become annoying with the various ticks that Michael has.

Does Daisy Ridley make for a believable action heroine? I lean towards the no, especially when in the opening of the film she is made out to be this almost cat-like figure, able to move around with the greatest of ease. She seemed too hard throughout Cleaner even when Joey did not need to be. Matthew Orton, Simon Uttley and Paul Andrew Williams' screenplay does not establish that Joey has all these skills to take down a group of terrorists. 

There are quick mentions of her time in the military, but the film does not do much to make Joey this solid action figure. It is not implausible, but Cleaner expects us to basically take them at their word that she, single-handedly, is a major threat to them. More curious is how Hume, the Sargeant Powell to Joey's John McClane, feels pretty removed from things. 

Cleaner is as I said a pretty disposable and forgettable film. I did not enjoy it as an action film or character study or as a "so bad it's good" manner. I did not hate it. I figure that Cleaner is fine if you have to have some kind of distraction playing in the background.

DECISION: D+