Cleaner is not Die Hard. The director, Martin Campbell said that they did everything they could to not make it like Die Hard. Well, technically he’s right, Cleaner is not Die Hard.
Cleaner is Die Hard, but if you took out Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, tension, action, comedy, catchphrases, good editing, music, and anything exciting. Cleaner is Die Hard for the modern audience.
It stars Daisy Palpatine, Clive Owen, Matthew Tuck, Lee Boardman, Stella Stocker, Rufus Jones, and Ben Essex. Campbell directs, with Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton penning the screenplay.
The Story
As I have clearly stated, this is not Die Hard. The story is:
Criminal activists hijack a gala, taking 300 hostages. One extremist plans mass murder as a message to the world. An Ex-soldier turned window cleaner now works to rescue the hostages.
This is nothing like the story in Die Hard. In that movie, a bunch of terrorists crashed a party, took hostages, and planned to murder people. It was a cop from New York who stopped them though, not an ex-solider, so it’s completely different!
We meet Joey (Palpatine) who has a crappy life and a crappy job and she’s English, it can’t get any worse. She has a brother, who has ‘autism’ (I’ll come back to the quote marks later), who gets kicked out of his lodgings.
She takes him to work, in a tall building, not a skyscraper like a certain other movie, but a tall building in London. She’s a window cleaner and dangles off the edge of the building, cleaning the outside of the windows.
Her boss is an ass who’s a white, middle-aged man, who spends most of his time oppressing her. I can’t think where I have seen that before, wait, yes I can, in every movie in the past 10 years.
Oh No, Bad Guys!
There’s a party going on, bad guys crash it and take hostages. They want to show the world that the company is killing the environment and plan to stream confessions from the directors.
Don’t worry though, Joey is hanging around outside of the building. In fact, Joey spends most of her time outside, it is 1 hour and 9 minutes before she gets inside to ‘fight the terrorists’. At this point, there are 27 minutes of Cleaner left, including about 7 minutes of end credits.
This Is Not Die Hard
Cleaner is Die Hard, but they have just stripped away everything good that made Die Hard so feckin’ awesome. Palpatine’s character is dull and uninteresting, but she’s only a girl boss for about 15 minutes towards the end.
Clive Owen’s character isn’t much better, but that’s OK, he’s not in the movie long. The other bad guy is kind of cool, but also completely forgettable.
There are other actors in this movie as well. That’s all I need to say about them, well, apart from the guy who plays her ‘autistic’ brother. Not sure what his name is and I can’t be arsed to look it up.
I put the autistic in quotation marks as you only find out he’s autistic when he tells you, about 20 minutes in. I found this rather insulting to autistic people, as I have worked with people with autism and none of them act the way this guy does. The only reason they gave him ‘autism’ is to have him leave his lodging, go to work with Joey, and then hack the bad guy’s computers later.
The trope of calling someone a “hacker” is so dated. I also hate how a movie hacker can hack anything, in the world, ever. Makes me think of Independence Day, when they uploaded the virus to the mothership, which was also using Windows XP.
Daisy, Daisy
We first met Palpatine in The Force Awakens, her first major role. Confession here, but when we first met Rey, when she was sat outside her AT-AT, eating dinner and watching a spaceship fly off, I started to fall in love with Rey. Don’t get me wrong, an hour and a half later I was less interested.
Ridley seems like a nice girl and I have always felt that Disney has screwed her over, big time. It’s not her fault that Rey was a badly written character, I’m sure she had some input into Rey, but not her overall story.
In Cleaner, she’s even more boring than Rey. Ex-soldier turned window cleaner, although I honestly had no idea she was an ex-soldier from the movie. I only found that out halfway through, when I was picking up my phone and researching the movie.
John McClane was a cop. He’s a cop from the outset, a cop, a policeman, the fuzz. Joey isn’t really anything, I don’t recall a mention of her being in the military. In the last 15 minutes, when she started to kick ass, I was laughing as for the rest of the movie, she just was just a cleaner on a crane.
Speaking of being on a crane, at no point did I get a sense that Joey was actually on a crane. The greenscreen is really bad, so there is no sense of danger on the crane, she’s fine.
The Direction
Campbell is the man who gave us No Escape, Goldeneye, Casino Royale and The Mask of Zorro, all good, quality entertainment movies. However, in later years he gave us The Protégé and Dirty Angels, both movies are about girl bossing. Cleaner is another one with the same trope.
The overall direction isn’t bad from Campbell, but it’s the story that lets the entire thing down. He must have read the script and decided to make this. I guess shooting in London was appealing. Maybe he lives here now? He is from New Zealand.
I find it amazing that some directors can get it so right, but also so wrong at other times. This is not one of Campbell’s finest.
Coming back to the green screen, in Die Hard, you knew that Willis, and his stuntman, were dangling off the side of Nakatomi Plaza. One wrong move, one dodgy wire, and they would have died. Here, there is zero danger for anyone.
Overall
As I said, Cleaner is Die Hard, but with everything stripped away, it’s for the modern audience. There’s a girl boss that doesn’t do much for most of the movie. When she does, she’s the most badass woman on the planet.
I’m not sure they knew how to end this movie. The bad guy has an evil plan for the end of the movie, but it’s very weak. Hans Gruber had a plan to get away, one which was calculated, clever and made him intelligent.
The bad guy in Cleaner has a plan to get away, but it’s a cop-out of a plan. When he’s foiled by Joey, hardly a spoiler, I actually laughed at how stupid it was.
Cleaner is Die Hard, but it’s not Die Hard. Don’t bother watching Cleaner, watch Die Hard. There’s a great story, great action, Willis, Rickman, everything in Die Hard just works. When you take away all of the cool of Die Hard, you are left with Cleaner.
