Cleaner: Needs more polish

Cleaner (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for violence, brief drug use and frequent profanity

Available via: MAX

By Derrick Bang

This feels like the British response to Die Hard.

 

Director Martin Campbell has plenty of muscular action epics on his résumé, including a pair of Bonds — GoldenEye and Casino Royale — so he’s certainly comfortable with the genre. Alas, the major problem here is that Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams and Matthew Orton’s script wanders during the first two acts, making us wait too long to get to the “good stuff.”

 

Joey (Daisy Ridley) desperately tries to break a shatter-proof glass window, in order to
gain entry to the high-rise building that is under siege by eco-terrorists.

Even so, the story establishes a nice bond between Joey (Daisy Ridley) and her autistic older brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), which has a sweet payoff in the climactic third act.

A brief prologue shows adolescent Joey (Poppy Townsend White) growing up in an abusive household, where she has developed Spider-Man-style wall-climbing skills as a means of fleeing her father’s outbursts. Flash-forward 20 years; Joey has blossomed into a tough woman with a hair-trigger aversion to bad behavior by men. Her potential career with the British Army’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment concluded abruptly after she beat up a misogynistic fellow soldier.

 

Her current job as a window cleaner at London’s One Canada Square — the UK’s third-tallest building — is the latest in a series of dead-end jobs. Her inability to maintain a stable lifestyle is mirrored by her brother, a hacker savant who has just been bounced from his ninth care facility placement. She’s therefore forced to bring him to work on this fateful day, and parks him in the building lobby. (Really, she should know better.)

 

In an upstairs ballroom, Agnian Energy is touting its clean, planet-friendly credentials during a shareholder gala hosted by CEOs Geoffrey Milton (Rufus Jones) and his piggish brother Gerald (Lee Boardman). The party is crashed by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) and fellow members of his radical Earth Revolution eco-activists; they’re determined to expose the Miltons as hypocrites whose company has made its millions via heinous pollution and razing of pristine forest land.

 

Although terrifying for the guests, this activist action is somewhat reasonable — given Agnian’s truly deplorable behavior — until Blake’s control is usurped by one of his violently unhinged Earth Revolution associates: radical antihumanist Lucas Vander (Taz Skylar). Then things get really nasty.

 

Joey, stuck outside the building, witnesses the whole thing ... and can do nothing.

 

Worse yet, when she resourcefully figures out a way to alert police, her actions are spotted by Vander, who calls 999 and claims that she’s a terrorist.

 

This is when the script goes off the rails, because that’s an eyebrow-lifting contrivance too many.

Stan & Ollie: A warm, heartfelt tribute

Stan & Ollie (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were enormously popular film stars for roughly a decade starting in 1927, in great part because they were among the very few comedy actors who successfully navigated the transition from silent films to talkies.

Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan, left) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly, right) are dismayed
when their British manager/handler, Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), explains that
they'll be stuck playing small, run-down theaters ... at least, for awhile.

(Indeed, some of their later one-liners remain gems to this day. “You can lead a horse to water,” Stanley observes, in the 1930 short Brats, “but a pencil must be led.”)

Credit for teaming the slim Englishman (Laurel) with the corpulent American (Hardy) goes to early motion picture impresario Hal Roach, who made them an official double act with the 1927 silent short, Putting Pants on Philip. They became indefatigably busy thereafter, with a résumé that boasts 32 silent shorts, 40 sound shorts — including 1932’s Academy Award winner, The Music Box — and 23 features.

They never quite cracked the list of Top 10 American film stars — by box-office receipts — but they were among the Top 10 international film stars in 1936 and ’37. Their gentle brand of humor, and their films, were universal.

Director Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is a warm and deeply poignant tribute to what would become their swan song: an ambitious UK tour in 1953 and ’54, undertaken despite their declining health. After that final curtain, they never again appeared together; Hardy died in 1957, and Laurel survived him by another eight years.

Screenwriter Jeff Pope plays fast and loose with a few historical details, but the core narrative is reasonably faithful: most notably the bond between two men who had worked together for so long, that their relationship was far more deep than that with respective wives over the years. Pope’s tone is heartfelt, and Baird’s direction is impressively delicate; at no time does this often melancholy story become mawkish, nor is there any sense that the duo’s memory is being exploited unduly.

Mostly, though, the film is driven by superlative performances from Steve Coogan (Stan) and John C. Reilly (Ollie, more affectionately known as “Babe”).

Coogan is particularly impressive, clearly having studied Laurel meticulously enough to perfectly mimic his impeccably timed pantomime. It’s not merely a matter of reproducing the stage bits performed before an adoring public, but also mastering the doe-eyed, less-is-more dancer’s grace with which Stan carries himself, behind closed doors.

One of the key points of Pope’s script, however — adapted from A.J. Marriot’s 1993 book, Laurel & Hardy: The British Tours — is that Stan’s outwardly mild manner conceals a creative talent chafing at the contractual restraints imposed by Roach (Danny Huston, suitably imperious). As depicted here, Ollie is content and complacent, cheerfully willing to do as he’s told; Stan is ambitious, desiring the greater freedom that he knows will make them even more successful.

This dichotomy will resurface later, under less than ideal circumstances.

The Foreigner: Not to be ignored

The Foreigner (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity and some sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.13.17

This film likely isn’t on your radar.

It should be.

Irish Deputy Minister Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan, right) is kind enough to grant some
time to Quan Ngoc Minh (Jackie Chan), who hopes to learn the identity of the terrorists
who killed his daughter, back in London. The meeting ... does not go well.

Director Martin Campbell and scripter David Marconi have transformed prolific British thriller author Stephen Leather’s 1992 novel, The Chinaman, into a crackerjack espionage drama: an absolutely perfect vehicle for star Jackie Chan, shrewdly playing a character his actual age (63 years young).

And while it’s true that the beloved martial arts sensation no longer hurls himself out of trees, or through multiple plate-glass windows, he still has moves. Plenty of them.

Marconi’s script is a clever update of Leather’s novel, which was written while the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s brutal bombing campaign was climaxing (and which, mercifully, would conclude with a cease-fire in 1997). This big-screen adaptation benefits from taut direction, crisp editing and a devious narrative laden with twists and double-crosses.

And, most of all, from Chan’s captivating portrayal of a character who completely wins our hearts and minds.

The contemporary setting introduces Quan Ngoc Minh (Chan) as a quiet London restaurateur, who dotes on his teenage daughter, Fan (Katie Leung): the sole family member left after a couple of earlier tragedies. Campbell and Marconi deftly sketch their loving relationship during a prologue that feels ominous because of its mundane normality.

Our fears prove justified, when Fan’s enthusiastic dive into a dress shop turns tragic as a terrorist bomb goes off. Credit for the heinous act is claimed by a group calling itself The Authentic IRA.

Although swept into in a maelstrom of grief that threatens to drown him — Chan’s expression and body language are heartbreaking, during these early scenes — Quan patiently, doggedly navigates “proper channels” in an effort to secure a piece of information that he deems naïvely simple: the name, or names, of the bombers.

He finally gains a chat with Commander Richard Bromley (Ray Fearon), head of the British anti-terrorist task force charged with investigating the attack. Although sympathetic, Bromley assures Quan that his team is doing everything possible, and sends him home. But Quan cannot let it rest, much to the mounting concern of his restaurant partner, Lam (Tao Liu), who clearly loves him.