Not the second coming but after the dirge of Dirty Angels, Cleaner is Martin Campbell firing on more cylinders than he has for a while.
It is not great, but it looks better than most of Campbell’s recent work, and in Daisy Ridley, Campbell has a performer who can anchor his terse, no frills approach - a godsend when the script is not giving much to work with.
I have not been the biggest fan of this late stage of the director’s work:
The Protege, Memory and Dirty Angels have their moments, but at some point they would fall apart, either in terms of production values, or undernourished scripts that mistake plot turns for complication and nuance.
Cleaner is the first one of this run that feels like it comes from the guy who made GoldenEye and Mask of Zorro.
While I am not sure I would call him an auteur, Campbell seems to always be striving to make entertaining movies with a little more nutrition - a sociopolitical element, and a strong dramatic relationship at the core.
After watching Edge of Darkness last year, I cannot help but look at the rest of his career as an attempt to recapture that project’s balance between genre and something more elevated. One can see that in his decision to not stick with the Bond franchise beyond one installment at a time.
One can see that tension across his less successful movies: Beyond Borders, Memory and Dirty Angels.
One can see that duality in Cleaner - on the one hand, a traditional Die Hard-style action thriller, and on the other, the attempt to inject some criticism of capitalism’s contribution toward climate change in the portrayal of the film’s secondary antagonists, two brother CEOs who become the central hostages in the terrorists’ plot.
The film falters when it attempts to juggle this hydra of antagonists with a pretty simple action narrative.
Considering the filmmaker’s facility with action, it is ironic that the film is at its best in the opening scenes, when it is grounding us in the relationship between Joey and her brother Michael (Matthew Tuck).
Cleaner’s opening is legitimately great - it fooled me and elevated my expectations for the movie that followed.
We get a brief flashback of the siblings as children - it is a grim grounding, while her offscreen brother is berated by their father, young Joey climbs out of the window of their tower block flat to look out at the city.
Cut to adult Joey scrambling to get to work while dealing with her brother’s expulsion from the care home where he lives.
In a few minutes, with only a few lines of dialogue, we get a sense of our central characters. More significantly, this one section stands out for displaying a successful balance of tones that it sadly fails to sustain throughout.
While there is a tension underlying Joey and Michael’s race to her job, it is laced with a sense of humour that seems to come both from the situation and the performers’ dynamic. It feels so naturalistic and organic I was thinking Campbell might have found a winner.
I think most of my good feelings toward Cleaner come from the star.
Campbell’s movies are all about the eyes. Banderas in Mask of Zorro, Craig in Casino Royale, the late, great Bob Peck in Edge of Darkness. Ridley may not have the material those actors had but she is an extremely empathetic actor, and when the camera is on her face, she gives the movie an emotional heft it sorely needs.
It is hard to avoid the Die Hard comparisons with Cleaner. This movie is nowhere near as good.
The film falls into a trap that seems to affect a lot of contemporary action movies, by setting up two antagonists. It might have worked if it raised the stakes, but it just confuses the geography of who our heroine is against.
As for the action, there is not a lot of it.
While Ridley displays some great physicality, I wished there was a little more originality to the set pieces and the environments they took place in.
In the end, Cleaner winds up being a minor disappointment.
It does not turn into a disaster, but it also lacks any signature moment that I could recommend.
Ridley gives the movie some real heft, and there are times when it feels like the filmmaker is energised by her performance.
Apparently Campbell and Ridley have another movie in the planning stages. Fingers crossed if it comes to pass, and Campbell gets a good picture out of it, without the qualifiers I gave Cleaner.
No comments:
Post a Comment