I don’t think it’s an overstatement to refer to Die Hard as a founding father of modern action cinema. In fact, I think it might be an understatement. John McTiernan’s seminal 1988 genre staple is a pristine encapsulation of what action films can be at their very best: ballistic, endearing, and a rip-roaring good time. To this end, it’s no surprise that Die Hard has had as palpable an impact on the genre for as long as it has.
In the immediate aftermath of Die Hard’s monumental success, audiences were treated to Die Hard on a plane (Air Force One), Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege), Die Hard on a bus (Speed), and Die Hard at an airport (Die Hard 2: Die Harder). Each of these films took the same basic formula of that first film (a ‘good guy with a gun’ is accidentally thrown into the middle of an in-progress terrorist hostage situation) and riffed on it to some degree. But even Die Hard knew it had to switch things up after a little while, with all of the latter three installments in the five-film franchise taking Bruce Willis’ central protagonist, John McClane, out of the bottle-episode setting of the first two films and unleashing him upon a larger world, for better or worse.
I say all of this to say it’s strange to walk into Martin Campbell’s new action film Cleaner and essentially get a straight-up Die Hard remake. That’s not to say that Cleaner is a bad movie; far from it. I actually quite enjoyed Campbell’s latest British punch-em-up. I just want to say that it caught me thoroughly off guard to be midway through the film and realize just how to the letter this film was playing it in terms of essentially being Die Hard starring Daisy Ridley. While that certainly has its pleasures to be had, it constantly reminds you of Die Hard and all but outright forces you to mentally compare the two, and that’s not something I would wish upon any film. Die Hard is an immaculate standard to hold oneself to, and for as much as I did enjoy elements of Cleaner, it isn’t fucking Die Hard.
The Die Hard element probably seems like a strange thing to harp on in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot express to you enough, dear reader, how much the script by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton owes to Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza’s script for the McTiernan masterpiece. If you take Die Hard’s script, swap out an estranged wife for an estranged brother, and search-replace ‘air ducts’ with ‘window cleaning cradle,’ you’ve essentially got Cleaner’s script. Because of just how close it veers to that source text, the differences or lack thereof become a blade that cuts both ways. When it hits the exact same beats at the exact same point in the structure of the film as Die Hard, it can’t help but feel derivative. But when it does branch out and try to add a new element to the mix, it is almost always to the detriment of this film.
For example, one of the big wrinkles in Cleaner that is entirely its own relates to the primary antagonists. Their motivations, the interpersonal relationships of the team, and ultimately, the personalities that chafe against one another within that framework are interesting, and Campbell does the best he can to really mine these beats for what they’re worth. But, in order to adhere more directly to the pre-established template in play, the script has to essentially introduce, explore, and resolve all of this in the span of five minutes, all within the first act of the film. While this could have been a worthwhile thread to elongate across the runtime of the film, with a certain butting of heads potentially serving as a great upping of the stakes deep in the second act of the story, they simply don’t do that. Instead, it’s run through with all the nuance of a bull in a china shop as fast as humanly possible. The result is jarring rather than shocking and turns what should be valid emotional depth and character work into garish and awkward melodrama.
Fortunately, the dynamic duo of Daisy Ridley and Martin Campbell put on their boots and get to work, and the combined efforts of the two of them make for frequently compelling stuff. For all the similarities it evokes and all the broad-as-the-side-of-a-barn tropes it hits, Cleaner’s first act does a stellar job setting up multiple characters, threads, and locations thanks to Campbell’s direction. The stakes are high, motivations are clear, and the geography of the central location is well-established. Things get a lot murkier in the second act, narratively, as some of those threads get tangled or lost altogether, but Campbell and cinematographer Eigil Bryld continue to keep the audience grounded in a sense of space quite well.
Strengthening all of this even more is Daisy Ridley’s central performance. Ridley has such an inherently wide range of talents: she’s funny, charismatic, capable of mining remarkable bits of pathos out of relatively little, and has an insane physical presence. You need look no further than the Throne Room setpiece in Star Wars: The Last Jedi to see just how remarkably capable she is of performing full-bodied physical choreography and stunt work on her own, and Campbell puts that to stellar use here. The action sequences are well-staged, with clarity and kineticism, and Ridley more than sells her ends of them. But honestly, it’s the smaller stuff that Ridley really excels at. I personally loved the little details of her physical performance while she’s stranded in the window-washing cradle; from pacing back and forth to the genuine fear she exudes with her whole body when it seems as if she’s doomed to fall from it, it’s a palpable, compelling performance that strengthens the whole film.
Having said that, there is some occasionally wonky editing that can make the whole film feel less than seamless. This applies to the fight sequences (there are some attempts at stitching to make two shots feel like one cohesive shot that feels particularly blunt) but rings all the more true in the film’s quieter moments. There are a couple of different conversations held between Ridley and her character’s neurodivergent brother (as played by real-life neurodivergent actor Matthew Tuck) that are less than ideal. There’s a genuine sense of sibling-esque chemistry between Ridley and Tuck that feels fittingly worn in, and you can tell there’s a real desire to meaningfully explore this dynamic amongst the performers themselves, but the final edit rarely services them in these moments. Instead, the fast-cutting often feels like it skips a few steps too many in ramping up the emotions of a given scene, undercutting the emotional honesty of it in the process.
But no one suffers from the edit quite as badly as Taz Skylar, who plays Noah, one of the film’s primary antagonists, and has to spend a huge chunk of the film menacingly shouting into various earpieces and phones. Skylar is certainly giving his all in these bits, contorting his face and pursing his lips, but the edit rarely affords him the room to ramp up authentically to these emotions, with his performance instead just feeling erratic and kind of all over the place.
I still have many questions about Cleaner. Why is so much of it just Die Hard lite? Why is Daisy Ridley’s protagonist left to be a completely passive bystander for most of the second act? Why not put her inside of the building to interact with other characters before the third act? Why was Daisy Ridley’s character’s whole look designed like this film was supposed to come out in 2009 and star that era of Kristen Stewart? Is it really so infatuated with Avengers: Endgame that it had to include whole bits of dialogue and a critical third-act payoff correlating to it? Why does every single hand-to-hand action sequence happen in the same room of this skyscraper building with plenty of other pre-established locations?
But at the end of the day, I did enjoy myself. It’s a meager, small-scale thing that’s a bit messy and more than a bit derivative, but the combination of Campbell’s white-knuckle direction and Ridley’s steadfastly committed performance made the whole more than the sum of its parts for me.
RGM GRADE
(C)
I’m not telling you that I would drop everything and run to the nearest cinema right now to see Cleaner again, but I am telling you that one day in the hay future, if Cleaner happens to be kicking around on a streamer, I’ll probably throw it on.
