Fans split over thriller that's 'British Die Hard' and 'palate cleanser' for John Wick spin-off
The film is available to stream now
A new thriller featuring Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley is being hailed as a 'female Die Hard' and an ideal way to prepare for upcoming John Wick spin-off.
Cleaner is now available for streaming after recently being added to the ever-evolving library offered by Sky Cinema. It is also accessible to those with the appropriate membership on the streaming platform NOW.
Daisy Ridley, famed for her role as Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy including Force Awakens, Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, stars in the film. She is also expected to return to the George Lucas created galaxy far far away in the near future.
In Cleaner, she shares the screen with Boiling Point star Taz Skylar and Clive Owen. The movie's plot revolves around a group of criminal activists who take over an energy company's annual gala to expose their corruption. However, their noble cause is taken over by an extremist ready to kill everyone in the building to broadcast his anarchic message.
Ridley plays an ex-soldier turned window cleaner, who finds herself suspended 50 storeys up on the outside of a London skyscraper, tasked with saving those trapped inside, including her younger brother, reports Surrey Live.
The film is directed by Martin Campbell, known for directing James Bond movies Goldeneye with Pierce Brosnan, as well as the Daniel Craig reboot Casino Royale. He also directed Green Lantern with Ryan Reynolds and The Foreigner starring Jackie Chan.
Less than a week after its release, the film is storming up the charts on streaming platform NOW, claiming the top spot as the most-watched movie despite garnering just 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. While reactions from movie buffs have been a mixed bag, many can't help drawing parallels to the action-packed Die Hard, famously led by Bruce Willis.
The critiques are varied, with one saying: "Cleaner starts off as a promising thriller that's obviously inspired by Die Hard, with a hero battling office-invading terrorists. But as the movie goes along, it becomes too ridiculous to take. Everything devolves into corny dreck with uneven acting."
Still, another commendation comes for its effective use of a modest budget: "Regardless, and despite its obvious budget constraints, Cleaner is a certainly entertaining, action-packed romp that's also well-shot."
There's even applause for Daisy Ridley's performance as Ridley's character in 'Cleaner' has captured attention with acclaim coming her way: "What makes Martin Campbell's Cleaner such an entertaining ride is the central performance by Daisy Ridley...Yes, it's the usual 'disillusioned-therefore-reluctant-hero' role but she gives it more depth than usual."
But echoes of Die Hard linger among fans, with one stating online: "Very entertaining. Great fight sequences. Die Hard comes to London."
Sadly, not everyone was thrilled, as one viewer remarked: "Female Die Hard with British accents. It's not awful if you enjoy the genre, but it lacks any real excitement. The plot holes are painful. One watch was enough."
Yet another commenter on X had a different take, hinting at its potential as a warm-up act for an anticipated release: "Ballerina will be in cinemas soon so you can call this a palate cleanser if you want."
Cleaner is streaming on Sky Cinema and NOW.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘It was simply mind-blowing': readers remember seeing Star Wars for the first time
A relatively long time ago in cinemas near and far away, the first Star Wars film captivated a generation of children and adults. As the British Film Institute in London this week screens the original 1977 theatrical version of the space opera, which has rarely been shown since the 1990s, readers have shared their recollections of its groundbreaking special effects, iconic heroes and villains, and queueing around the block for tickets. Most of those who responded to a Guardian callout recalled being mesmerised by the film's opening crawl, then 'blown away' by the first scene in which Princess Leia's starship is captured by an immense Imperial Star Destroyer. 'It loomed right over our heads in the theatre, immediately putting us in the action, alerting us to the huge stakes in this world,' said Marilyn Stacey, a 68-year-old paralegal and actor from Portland, Oregon, who saw the film with her boyfriend in Westwood, Los Angeles, soon after it opened in the US in May 1977. Many readers said Star Wars was the first 'grownup' film they saw as children, with their few previous trips to the cinema being for Disney films such as Mary Poppins or the Herbie comedies about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle. Mark Hannaby, who was six in 1978 when his father drove him from the suburbs of Wrexham, north-east Wales, to see the film at the biggest screen nearby at the Odeon in Liverpool, recalled how it captured his imagination. 'At that age, I don't think you expect the external world to correspond with your internal world,' said Hannaby, 52, now a journalism lecturer at the University of Chester. 'Dad said my face never left the screen. I was hungry for the story, and unusually uninterested in the wine gums he offered. Even for years afterwards, nothing really compared to it.' Lois Pass, from Southend-on-Sea, who didn't have a TV at home when she saw the film as a teenager in 1978, agreed. 'To suddenly see battles taking place in space, travel faster than the speed of light, plus this mysterious power – the Force – in a galactic battle between good and evil was simply mind-blowing,' she said. Like many readers, Cliff Ramshaw's anticipation for the film had been fuelled by its merchandising. By the time it came out in the UK, Ramshaw, now 58, had already read the novelisation and part of the Marvel comic book adaptation, and had decorated his school haversack with drawings of X-wings and Tie fighters. Unfortunately, his father did not share his enthusiasm for the film when he took him and his younger brother to see it in Sunderland in 1978. 'We arrived early and Dad, not wanting to hang around, took us in straight away [to an earlier screening],' he recalled. 'We sat down just in time to see the attack on the Death Star. After the movie ended we remained seated while the audience left and a new crowd arrived. We saw the beginning and middle of the movie and then, when the attack on the Death Star was about to start, Dad took us out of the cinema and drove us home!' Ramshaw, who now lives in the Cotswolds, didn't get to see the film the whole way through until it was aired on British TV four years later. But his unusual viewing experience did not dampen his love for Star Wars, and he later became a software engineer at George Lucas's visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. Luke Skywalker's journey from a farm boy on a backwater planet to a hero of the rebellion particularly enraptured readers who had grown up in small or remote communities. Back in 1978, Pass, who grew up in the Essex coastal town of Shoeburyness, was grappling with discomfort about her 'lowly position on the social scale' at the local grammar school. 'There was Luke, a poor, scruffy, nobody from nowhere, just like me, suddenly plucked from obscurity to discover his true calling. Obi-Wan Kenobi revealing that there is a whole lot more to his life than he could ever have imagined [was] a potent message!' Many women who responded to the callout recalled how enamoured they were with Princess Leia's attitude. Rebecca Pollock, a HR worker from Brisbane, Australia, said: 'For a young girl, growing up in a country town in Queensland, watching an amazing heroine like Princess Leia dominate her world gave me a role model who was brave, adventurous and strong in the face of adversity. I loved it when she looked up at Darth Vader and talked back to him, and her banter with Han Solo. Her wit and sarcastic approach was so different to what I'd seen women be.' It wasn't just children and teenagers who were enraptured. Milton Justice, a former artistic director of the Stella Adler Academy of Acting and Theatre, saw the film after Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, auditioned for a part in a murder-mystery film he was producing. 'I remember Carrie's audition, because she was very quirky as an actor. She didn't get the part. After Star Wars opened, I went back into the company and said: 'Are you guys crazy?' I later knew her socially. She really was one of the funniest people ever. Even some of the line readings she did in Star Wars had that kind of way that she saw life.' Justice, who now runs a podcast about acting, said back then many people in the movie industry thought Star Wars was just a one-off. 'In an odd sense, we might have been more respectful of the story than the special effects. I don't blame Star Wars for the fact that so many movies today have so many special effects that you don't even see the story. I think it's very separate from those kind of films.'
Belfast Telegraph
21 hours ago
- Belfast Telegraph
Disney and Universal sue AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement
Filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, the complaint claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios to generate and distribute 'endless unauthorised copies' of their famed characters, such as Darth Vader from Star Wars and the Minions from Despicable Me. 'Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,' the companies state in the complaint. The studios also claimed the San Francisco-based AI company ignored their requests to stop infringing on their copyrighted works and to take technological measures to halt such image generation. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as 'kind of like a search engine' pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity. 'Can a person look at somebody else's picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?' Mr Holz said. 'Obviously, it's allowed for people and if it wasn't, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. 'To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it's sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it's fine.' Major AI developers do not typically disclose their data sources, but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the 'fair use' doctrine of American copyright law. The case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI platforms — such as OpenAI, Anthropic — in San Francisco and New York. Meanwhile, the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry is under way in London, pitting Getty Images against artificial intelligence company Stability AI.
South Wales Guardian
a day ago
- South Wales Guardian
Disney and Universal sue AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement
Filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, the complaint claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios to generate and distribute 'endless unauthorised copies' of their famed characters, such as Darth Vader from Star Wars and the Minions from Despicable Me. 'Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,' the companies state in the complaint. The studios also claimed the San Francisco-based AI company ignored their requests to stop infringing on their copyrighted works and to take technological measures to halt such image generation. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as 'kind of like a search engine' pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity. 'Can a person look at somebody else's picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?' Mr Holz said. 'Obviously, it's allowed for people and if it wasn't, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. 'To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it's sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it's fine.' Major AI developers do not typically disclose their data sources, but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the 'fair use' doctrine of American copyright law. The case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI platforms — such as OpenAI, Anthropic — in San Francisco and New York. Meanwhile, the first major copyright trial of the generative AI industry is under way in London, pitting Getty Images against artificial intelligence company Stability AI.
