Movie Review: ‘Cleaner’

Daisy Ridley as “Joey” in the action film 'Cleaner', a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.

‘Cleaner’ receives 5.5 out of 10 stars.

Opening in theaters February 21st is ‘Cleaner,’ directed by Martin Campbell and starring Daisy Ridley, Matthew Tuck, Taz Skylar, Ruth Gemmell, Flavia Watson, and Clive Owen.

Initial Thoughts

Daisy Ridley as “Joey” in the action film 'Cleaner', a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.

Everything old is new again. Well, sort of. We love a good action thriller, and we’re aware that the genre has certain tropes and conventions that usually crop up in most movies of this kind, but ‘Cleaner’ takes it one step further. While many of the plot details are changed, this is a pretty brazen remake of ‘Die Hard,’ with a lone person – in this case a woman, played by Daisy Ridley of ‘Star Wars’ fame – battling terrorists who capture a corporate skyscraper and take the people inside as hostages.

Our heroine has a loved one in the building that she’s desperate to keep safe as well, and her only communication with the outside world is with a cop who’s doing her best to keep our protagonist in the loop and out of the soup. It’s difficult to watch ‘Cleaner’ without constantly comparing it to Bruce Willis’ 1988 all-timer, but even on its own merits, ‘Cleaner’ doesn’t quite click thanks to some strange screenwriting choices.

Story and Direction

(L to R) Daisy Ridley and Director Martin Campbell behind the scenes of the action film 'Cleaner', a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.

We first meet Joey Locke as a child, as she crawls out a window in her apartment and sits on a ledge while her abusive father goes after her mother and neurodivergent older brother inside. This heavy-handed bit of character development, of course, comes in handy later (she likes to climb!), when we meet the adult Joey (Ridley).

Thrown out of the army for assaulting a fellow soldier (not quite what it seems), Joey works in London as a window cleaner at the vast Agnian Energy skyscraper. Her brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) has just been evicted from a care home for allegedly leaking some of their internal files (more exposition that also resurfaces later), with Joey struggling to figure out who’s going to take care of him next.

Joey is perpetually late to her job and perpetually mouthy to her employers, which doesn’t sit right when she snarks off to one of the heads of Agnian, Gerald Milton (Lee Boardman), in an elevator. Meanwhile, she’s deposited Michael in the lobby under the care of a security guard and commiserates with her co-worker Noah (Taz Skylar) as they clean the windows midway up the building. Noah leaves her to finish the job while the rest of the building staff prepares for a glitzy shareholders’ party that Gerald and his brother Geoffrey (Rufus Jones) are throwing that evening.

No sooner does the party begin than the building is invaded by a group of ecoterrorists known as Earth Revolution and led by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen), who holds the Miltons, their board, and their guests hostage, locks down the building, and plans to record confessions by the Miltons and the board of all their dirty dealings and clandestine anti-environmental activities.

Joey, trapped on her window cleaning cradle outside when the building’s systems are shut down, can only listen in horror through her earpiece while Michael hides out on one of the upper floors. She’s even more horrified when she learns that one of Marcus’ foot soldiers is none other than Noah – who, it turns out, has his own plans to wrest the operation from Marcus and upgrade it to a more destructive event.

Clive Owen as “Marcus“ in the action film 'Cleaner', a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.

Swap out the great Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber and his high-tech burglars for Clive Owen and the ecoterrorist bunch, replace Bruce Willis’ John McClane with Ridley’s Joey and McClane’s wife for Joey’s brother, and change up LAPD sergeant Al Powell for London police superintendent Claire Hume (Ruth Gemmell), and all the basic components from ‘Die Hard’ are basically in place.

There are differences, of course: Gruber never faces an internal uprising from his second-in-command, who turns out to be a true psychopath, and the aims of the group are radically different. It also takes a long time in ‘Die Hard’ for the LAPD to believe in McClane and his story; ‘Cleaner’ plays for a few minutes with the London police thinking that Joey herself is the terrorist before that would-be complication is dispatched.

That’s the second biggest problem with ‘Cleaner’: it plays like a Cliff Notes version of ‘Die Hard’ with the names changed. Director Martin Campbell, best known for two of James Bond’s finest films -- ‘GoldenEye’ and ‘Casino Royale’ -- can handle the action capably enough (unfortunate CG flames and explosions aside), but there’s a lot more talking on phones than forward momentum, and it weirdly seems easy for people to get around the building. While Campbell does manage to elicit some tension, thanks mainly to the unhinged Noah, there’s little sense of the cat-and-mouse suspense that the movie needs.

And that is due to the biggest problem of all: the screenplay (by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton) strands Joey on that damn cradle for almost the entire second act, making her a bystander instead of the pro-active force that she should be. When she finally gets in the game for real in the third act, she fights her way through the terrorists almost too easily as the movie barrels toward its resolution. Instead of being a wild card throwing sand in the gears of the terrorists’ seemingly well-oiled plans while barely staying one step ahead of them, Joey mostly cools her heels while the window cleaning cradle tilts this way and that.

It's a strange imbalance that, coupled with the perfunctory development of both the characters and their relationships (the script tries to forge the same McClane/Powell connection between Joey and Claire, but it’s purely surface level), makes ‘Cleaner’ feel like an intermittently interesting, half-hearted remake of a film that is the gold standard for the genre.

The Cast

(L to R) Daisy Ridley as “Joey” and Matthew Tuck as “Michael” in the action film 'Cleaner', a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.

Perhaps the best part of ‘Cleaner’ is the relationship between Daisy Ridley’s Joey and Michael Tuck’s Matthew. It’s too bad we don’t get to see enough of it, but the two actors generate a genuine warmth and sibling chemistry. Tuck, a relative newcomer who’s neurodivergent himself, brings sensitivity to his portrayal of a young man who’s fiercely devoted to his sister and battles against his challenges to help her – even if the script leaves him skulking around corners most of the time.

As for Ridley, the toxic minority of so-called ‘Star Wars’ fans who have hounded her mercilessly cannot overshadow the fact that she is a fine actor. She’s warm and funny here, and brings a terrific physicality to the action scenes when she finally gets a chance. It’s just a shame that her character is semi-sketched in and that she doesn’t get the chance to get onto the playing field until late in the movie – where everything happens so quickly that we don’t feel for her the way we do for the increasingly bedraggled McClane. There’s also a somewhat preposterous showdown at the end that harkens back to, of all things, a scene in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ -- only a little less believable.

As for the rest of the cast, Taz Skylar does bring a frightening intensity to Noah that generates much of the film’s suspense, and at least the writers don’t try to make him or Clive Owen (in his brief screen time) emulate Alan Rickman’s incomparable Gruber. Ruth Gemmell brings a strong presence and intelligence to the role of Claire, but she too gets little to work with.

Final Thoughts

Daisy Ridley as “Joey” in the action film 'Cleaner', a Quiver Distribution release. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.

Martin Campbell and his cast work hard to give ‘Cleaner’ a big feel and high stakes, but the film can’t help but seem small. It’s so nakedly reminiscent of ‘Die Hard’ in its general structure and premise that it simply can’t escape the comparison. ‘Cleaner’ only echoes past glories of the genre without finding any depth or voice of its own.

Cleaner

"The stakes are a thousand feet high."

Not Yet RatedFeb 21st, 2025

Showtimes & Tickets

Set in present-day London, a group of radical activists take over an energy company's annual gala, seizing 300 hostages in order to expose the corruption of the... Read the Plot

What is the plot of ‘Cleaner’?

An ex-soldier named Joey (Daisy Ridley) is working as a window cleaner at an energy corporation’s London skyscraper when a radical activist group takes over the building, leaving her trapped outside 50 stories in the air as she attempts to get back in, rescue the hostages, and save her brother who’s also inside.