Skip to main content

Cleaner -- a review

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems.

A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former British Army soldier, and she’s hell bent on protecting her vulnerable brother, Michael, regardless of whatever the threat might be.

Martin Campbell, who also helmed two of my favorite James Bond films, 1995’s Golden Eye, with Pierce Brosnan and 2006’s Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig (both films were each the debut of their lead actors as 007), directs Cleaner with a very sturdy and assured hand. This is a straight on action film that’s very well done, especially in the stunt department. But Campbell still leaves some room for character development. Joey, who is far from being perfect, had washed out of the British Army commando training corps for assaulting another commando trainee who thought she was coasting because she was a woman. Joey is a take-no-prisoners fighter, regardless of what the fight is, or the consequences, making her the perfect champion for her brother and the rest of the hostages.

Daisy Ridley, who is one of the best things about the flawed Star Wars sequels, is very good here as Joey. She easily carries the film on her capable shoulders. Ridley is charismatic enough of an actor to make the best with the material she’s given--regardless of the quality--such as what she did with her turn in Star Wars, by making the viewer keep their eyes on her Rey character. Ridley did that with just her affable screen presence alone, and she does the same thing here, this time working with a better, less messy story--thus enabling her to make Joey very sympathetic. And she also handles the rough and tumble stuff with plenty of flair, and is completely believable as an ex-soldier.

Cleaner also has a pretty cool plot twist with its villains, who start out as protectors of the enviornment who just want to get the truth out about the rampant corporate greed within the energy company. They wind up getting their non-lethal assault hijacked by a more fanatical faction within their ranks, who randomly kill people left and right. This ups the stakes, as well as the caliber of villain that Joey has to deal with. And she's more than capable. Granted, Cleaner may not be a masterpiece, but it’s still a vastly entertaining B-movie actioner that can be enjoyed for what it is: just a rousing good time. --SF

Cleaner is available on digital, streaming, and physical media.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Logan's Run -- a review

I first saw Logan’s Run in a New Jersey movie theater fifty years ago, when I was a boy. The theater, somewhere in the suburban wilds of the Garden State, was packed to the gills with people. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the movie back then—all I cared about that it was a brand new science fiction film, in an age when big budget SF properties on both TV and the big screen was very rare (of course, Star Wars , which would be released the very next year, would change all of that). Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run is a futuristic tale about a man named Logan 5 (Michael York) who has a special job in a place filled with hedonistic leisure. Logan lives within the splendor of a Utopian society whose population dwells within large domes. The interior is presented as a vast, upscale shopping mall where its citizens want for nothing. Every need, every whim, and every fantasy is met. Of course, there’s a catc...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Conjuring: Last Rites

Whether you believe in the “true” exploits of demonologists Ed & Lorraine Warren or not (I don’t), The Conjuring series of films, based on their “true” stories, have all been very entertaining, with everything now supposedly coming to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites . After a prologue in 1964, where we witness the traumatic birth of the Warren’s daughter, Judy, the rest of the movie advances to 1986, with the Warrens now somewhat retired. They’re still speaking at colleges, before giggly students who crack Ghostbusters jokes at them, but the Warrens have ceased personally investigating creepy cases on their own. That is, until their good friend Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) winds up hanging from a noose, thanks to a demonic attack. Father Gordon had been trying to get the Warrens to investigate the case of the Smurls--a family in Pennsylvania who are suffering through a severe haunting in their house, and when the Warrens finally do get involved, the demons come...
Post a Comment
Read more