CLEANER Review: DIE HARD Meets VERTICAL LIMIT. It's Not a Match Made in Heaven.

This is a film about a bad day – you know, the kind you cannot help but think you should’ve just stayed at home.

That’s exactly the case for Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley), who tries to ignore her alarm at the risk of being late for work, only to get an unpleasant phone call. Joey is then summoned to a facility her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) was staying at, and is informed that he is now out because he hacked their records to expose the corruption – which, by the way, sounds like a much more interesting movie that the one we’re actually getting.

Joey has no choice but to take Michael to her workplace, which happens to be the high-rise headquarters of a big corporation that is supposedly into clean energy, but are obviously bad guys. Not to worry, though, a group of other bad guys and girls are about to arrive, hijacking the high-profile party that is taking place in the building and taking hundreds of hostages. Joey, who works as a window cleaner, is stuck outside trying to come up with the way to save the day – and wishing she did stay at home.

Let’s just get it out of the way: yes, Martin Campbell’s new film, Cleaner, is a version of Die Hard and basically every other movie that was made as a version of Die Hard before. This is actually a not-so-bad part: having this reference, the audience sort of knows what to expect – straightforward but fun extravaganza with gunfire, explosions and lots of jokes. Nothing wrong with that. Even if the authors don’t have Bruce Willis, as long as we don’t end up with another Skyscraper (the Anna Nicole Smith one, although the one with Dwayne Johnson isn’t that much better) – we’re fine.

One of the problems is that Cleaner doesn’t just feel like John McTiernan's film alone; it's more like a patchwork, with tiny bits from all these other movies. Like Joey’s troubled but touching relationship with her brother that feels so familiar, because we’ve seen this particular dynamic many times over. Or the tough-as-nails police officer (played by Ruth Gemmell of the Bridgerton series fame) who sees right through the situation and doesn’t let herself be deterred by short-sighted SWAT team leaders. Or Clive Owen as the leader of the terrorists, who is prone to big speeches about important issues, who seems to be more or less the same character he was in Spike Lee’s Inside Man.

Introducing the actual matter of climate change as a motivation for a hostage plot in what’s supposed to be a fun, action-filled movie, is unfortunately another miss. As if the authors actually realize that turning eco-activists into bad guys isn’t very cool, they introduce a twist early on and try to complicate those motivations a little bit. It doesn’t really help: giving the main villain an additional dimension in the form of general people-hating and psychopathy on top of the ecological agenda doesn’t make things any less cringey.

Obviously, director Martin Campbell, who has been specializing in thrillers and action films for several decades, delivers some neat moments of suspense. Considering he already had experience with filming people having dramatic moments while hanging from extreme heights in Vertical Limit, that’s not too big of a surprise though.

Daisy Ridley has also already proven herself as a great action heroine, and she doesn’t disappoint. What does, is basically the relentless strive to make everyone look and sound cool, the constant banter that mostly just feels forced and awkward. It’s one thing to try and reinvent the feel of a 90s action in the new reality – it’s completely another to copy/ paste bits and pieces of such films and expect anyone to really connect with the result.

The film is now playing in select theaters via Quiver Distribution.