‘Cleaner’ Review: Rey Hard With A Vengeance Fails To Impress
You would have thought Hollywood would have learned this lesson by now, but perhaps it is us who need to learn a lesson about Hollywood.
It’s safe to say that about 6 years ago, moviegoers rejected Hollywood’s push to feed them an endless supply of female lead action movies under the guise that audiences would be more accepting of action stars who looked like them. After several failures such as Terminator: Dark Fate, the Charlie’s Angels reboot, Atomic Blonde, and dozens of others along the way, a reasonable individual would say that it’s time to move in a different direction.
But that’s how a reasonable person would think. When you’re talking about an industry that is controlled by a handful of multi-billion dollar multinational corporations that see film production studios as nothing more than a 15% slice of their overall portfolio, there will never be a failure big enough for Hollywood to listen to its audience.
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This leads us to actress Daisy Ridley, who was well known for the recent Disney Star Wars trilogy, playing the title character of Rey. Outside of Star Wars, however, things have not been going very smoothly for the career of Ridley, who has yet to find a single cinematic hit outside of Disney’s own franchise.
Most people reading this didn’t even know that Ridley had a brand new movie entitled Cleaner, which can best be described as “Die Hard with a woman.” The film stars Ridley as the character of Joey, who is a borderline burnout that can’t seem to get her life together.
Joey struggles to take care of her autistic brother, who just got kicked out of yet another home after hacking into confidential files of the organization. With no options available and the possibility of losing her job, Joey has no choice but to bring her brother to her workplace, as she is a high-rise window cleaner who has a problem with authority.
It just so happens that the night Joey brings her brother, an environmental terrorist organization hijacks the building and threatens to kill everybody if they do not give in to their demands. Joey and her brother become the only two people on the inside who can help prevent a mass casualty event.
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You don’t need much evidence to figure out that the script for this film was written for a man, yet when Daisy Ridley became available for the film, the screenwriter just decided to mass edit the pronouns and keep everything else the same. Cleaner is your typical run-of-the-mill budget action movie that is best served as a time filler for those who have a little over 90 minutes to kill.
Daisy Ridley has struggled over the last several years to find her niche outside of the Star Wars universe. Ridley has tried her hand at action movies a few times, except 2023’s The Marsh King’s Daughter hasn’t found much success critically or commercially.
Outside of a basic Wikipedia entry, there isn’t much more to her character in Cleaner outside of the fact that she’s a woman leading an action movie. Clive Owen is in the film, but don’t expect him to stick around too long because Taz Skylar, who is over the top to the point of comical, does the heavy lifting of this film.
For audiences, your enjoyment of this film will depend on what you are seeking to get out of this movie. As a by-the-numbers action film, Cleaner is far from terrible but is also far from gripping. The story is very similar to what audiences have seen in films like Die Hard, which doesn’t help the movie being compared to a superior film when trying to gauge the interest of your audience.
The movie is too straightforward and doesn’t offer you anything you haven’t seen before, but if you’re just looking for content, there are worse films to make. Director Martin Campbell has seen better movies, directing films like The Protégé and The Foreigner. Cleaner is a film that suffers from very basic screenwriting, which makes it a hard sell for a majority who have never heard of this movie.
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PROS
- Pacing
- Clive Owen
CONS
- Generic Action Story
- Taz Skylar
- Copy & Paste Storytelling
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