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Daisy Ridley’s Die Hard Knockoff, Cleaner, Has Some Fun Action But Little Else
Not even veteran action-master Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, GoldenEye) can’t fix this dopey script.
And Cleaner was directed by Martin Campbell, the legendary action maestro who gave us GoldenEye and Casino Royale and The Mask of Zorro, and who has been reliably churning out genre programmers for years now, even as the humble but efficient, non-franchise action-thriller has become an endangered cinematic species. Thus, when a group of ecoterrorists led by a longtime activist (Clive Owen) seizes a fancy-dress party for an energy company and starts killing people and making demands, the situation gains extra urgency: Michael is trapped somewhere inside the building. This is a potentially exciting concept, though the script (by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton) does the setup no favors with its clunky dialogue and ham-fisted character development.
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