Do you know that movie about some robbers who enter a building to steal and find themselves confronted by a guy who happens to be there and starts causing problems? Yes, that guy was Bruce Willis, and the movie was “Die Hard” (1988), an iconic film from those 80s years.
Now comes “Cleaner” with a very similar plot, except that times have changed and now Daisy Ridley is the heroine and the terrorists are actually eco-terrorists, though the intellectual challenge remains exactly the same: to forget everything and relax with an entertaining movie that makes us forget, at least for two hours, that the world is a real mess.
Martin Campbell directs this entertaining, fun action movie that will undoubtedly please fans of the action genre.
Plot
Joey Locke is a window cleaner in a luxurious company building. During a lavish party, terrorists gag the attendees to obtain access codes to the company, accusing them of murders and destroying the climate and planet with their toxic dumping.
About the Movie
It has what fans expect and knows exactly when to play and when to fold: “Cleaner” is a genre film born with the lesson well learned from a thousand similar genre movies with almost identical plots: the lone hero who confronts the villains. Times have changed, and now the hero is a woman played by Daisy Ridley, and the villains suffer a mutiny in the middle of the heist.
There is moral ambiguity, conflicting themes, and social criticism in the film, but don’t be fooled, because “Cleaner” is a movie that comes to entertain and knows how to do it: a frenetic pace in the classic Hollywood style, a dizzying montage, and characters that, although flat and pre-configured to the maximum in the hero and villain roles, achieve a certain ambiguity in the character of Marcus (played by Clive Owen), a robber with certain ethical principles.
Are you looking for action and entertainment that reminds you of those wonderful 80s movies when life was happier for everyone? “Cleaner” comes to remind us that Hollywood is still there, at least in spirit, to entertain us for a while and give us exactly what we came to find: fun.
So enjoy, because “Cleaner” is entertaining without pretending absolutely anything more than to entertain.
And entertaining, very entertaining.
