Daisy Ridley and Martin Campbell Team Up for Cleaner, But Only One Brings Enough Action
As disappointing as it is that studios no longer have much interest in releasing good romantic comedies, there’s admittedly something satisfying about the fact that an actress like Daisy Ridley has never really had to make one. Ridley, who shot to fame as Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, has exactly the winsome beauty, youthful pluckiness, and English accent that should, at minimum, have forced her into an arranged marriage to a Jane Austen adaptation, or a more modern rom-com where she, say, has a meet-cute with Tom Holland that doesn’t involve a woman-free dystopia where people can hear each other’s thoughts.
Instead, Ridley seems to take cues from both the scrappiness of her Star Wars character and the nerdiness of her Star Wars fans, appearing in thrillers like the aforementioned Chaos Walking, dramas of self-reliance like The Young Woman and the Sea and Sometimes I Think About Dying, and now Cleaner, a Die Hard knockoff – a true-blue knockoff, too, not one of those variations with a cowardly change in venue designed to distinguish itself. No, this Die Hard knockoff literally just takes place in a skyscraper, just like the original Die Hard; even its nominal gimmick, that some of it might take place on the outside of the building rather than the interior, doesn’t last the entire film.
That poorly green-screened portion of Cleaner takes place outside due to the profession of Joey Locke (Ridley), a window-cleaner who’s struggling to make ends meet while watching over her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck). After Michael is expelled from his group living situation, Joey dutifully drags him along to her job at a British skyscraper, where he’s meant to wait in the lobby as she does her rounds on a small platform dangling dozens of stories up. She’s stressed about her brother but nonchalant about the work itself; as an ex-soldier, she’s unusually spry, while the dishonorable discharge in her past speaks to a temper.
Naturally, it’s this evening that an eco-terrorist group chooses to crash a corporate benefit and take hostages, leaving Joey stranded outside and worried sick about her brother’s safety. Inside, there’s additional turmoil as the group’s leader (Clive Owen) clashes with his even-more-extreme lieutenant (Taz Skylar). So, yeah: Die Hard with some 2025 lip service to the looming danger of climate change, and an underestimated young military woman in place of a workaday cop.
This set-up should be like red meat for Martin Campbell, the action vet who successfully rebooted James Bond twice and made the Antonio Banderas Zorro movies, and re-emerged bringing some professionalism to the recent (and quite delightful) B-movie The Protégé. Cleaner is not on the level of the latter, nevermind movies from Campbell’s heyday – though it’s more immediately engaging than his lesser studio works like the similarly height-dependent Vertical Limit, or his recent and weirdly risible Dirty Angels. Well into his late period, Campbell still knows his way around a crisp cut, but sometimes that’s most noticeable in Cleaner when he’s not directing action at all – which is a surprising amount of the time. The movie has an early running gag involving the timing of a cut on Ridley swearing that has more kick than much of the piece-moving action in its midsection; such is the fate of a movie that has aspirations toward skyscraper-dangling thrills but no obvious solution to how they might be depicted with any real sense of scale or reality on a lower budget. Even minimal logistical challenges, like how Joey might communicate with someone through skyscraper-grade heavy glass on the windows, are fudged rather than solved.
Joey does eventually get inside the building. This could be a spoiler, I guess, for anyone expecting a Phone Booth-style limited-location thriller, but almost any viewers will find it a relief that the movie can finally go about staging some normal chases and fights without trying in vain to convince anyone that Ridley really is perilously high off the ground. This section of the movie delivers, albeit a little late; Ridley makes an appealing semi-reluctant action hero. She’s a Star Wars alumnus who actually seems to have internalized the physicality of her role in that galaxy; she’s just plain fun to watch, and parts of Cleaner follow suit.
It’s a confounding, then, that Campbell doesn’t build the movie around Ridley’s action heroics, or even her point of view. The film is further hampered by a disappointingly limited use of Owen, who feels like he could have shot his role in a couple of days, and the eye-rolling navigation of terrorist characters with sympathetic aims and those who Take Things Too Far. It’s also just, in the end, not quite enough of a real action movie, stranded instead as a nebulously suspenseful “thriller,” by which is meant, a movie where exciting things keep threatening to happen. Ridley and Campbell can make those promises credibly enough for an agreeable timekiller, but only Ridley arrives ready to fully deliver.
Director: Martin Campbell
Writers: Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, Matthew Orton
Stars: Daisy Ridley, Taz Skylar, Matthew Tuck, Clive Owen
Release Date: February 21, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.