Daisy Ridley’s Die Hard Knockoff, Cleaner, Has Some Fun Action But Little Else

Going into the new Daisy Ridley action movie, Cleaner, I assumed the title referred to one of those hit-man-type fixer characters who dispose of bodies and assorted undesirables in the wake of jobs gone wrong, such as the immortal “Victor the Cleaner,” portrayed by Jean Reno in Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita. (“I’m Victor, the Cleaner.” Pew-pew.) But no, the movie is about an actual window cleaner working at the Shard, the real-life London skyscraper that happens to be the tallest building in Britain. Of course, when our hero winds up in the middle of a violent terrorist takeover and hostage standoff, she must use her special set of skills as an ex-soldier to handle the situation. So, it’s less La Femme Nikita and more Die Hard in … a building, much like the original Die Hard.

Believe it or not, this is some cause for hope. While most Die Hard knockoffs pale when compared to Die Hard, there’s also a noble tradition of movies — mostly from the 1990s, admittedly — that took a Die Hard–y premise and really ran with it. Films like Speed and Under Siege and Cliffhanger and The Rock and maybe half a dozen others. (For a thoroughly entertaining and ongoing history of this tradition, check out Liam Billingham and Phil Gawthorne’s excellent podcast, Die Hard on a Blank.) 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. (Campbell’s previous effort, the sleazily compelling, Eva Green–starring war thriller, Dirty Angels, was dumped by Lionsgate just this past December. I was one of the few fans of his 2022 Liam Neeson hit-man-with-dementia flick, Memory, but I was less keen on his 2021 Maggie Q–Michael Keaton assassin movie, The Protégé.) The director might not be getting studio blockbusters anymore, but he still has a great eye and an inner sense of rhythm when it comes to fights and shoot-outs. When the mayhem starts, we know we’re in sure hands.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts. As Joey Locke, the overworked window washer frustrated with her thankless job in a corporate building, Ridley deploys the same glower for every challenge her character faces. The film opens with Joey as a young girl, hiding out in the kitchen while her family fights in another room and then acrobatically free-climbing her way across the cabinets and toward an open window, where she can be alone with her thoughts. When we next catch Joey, she’s all grown up and trying to deal with the fact that her autistic brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), has been kicked out of yet another institution. Not knowing where to take him, Joey brings Michael to work with her. 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. Stuck outside on a movable cleaning platform hundreds of feet in the air, Joey is the only person close enough to the situation to intervene. But she’s also, well, stuck outside on a movable cleaning platform hundreds of feet in the air.

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. It also really doesn’t help that Michael’s neurodivergence feels more like a half-baked plot convenience rather than anything resembling authentic character detail. The fact that the hero is stationary for much of the film also leads to some ill-advised, talky padding. At times, one can imagine a more effective version of this movie where no one says anything, where the inability of the cleaner to communicate with anybody inside or outside the building becomes part of the suspense.

Still, there’s fun to be had here. Campbell shoots and edits action cleanly, taking care to let us know where the characters are and what they’re doing without skimping on the lizard-brain thrills the genre requires. He makes effective use of location to enhance the visceral kick of his sequences. With a film in which the protagonist is largely confined to a cleaning platform, the challenge becomes less about spatial clarity and more about finding ways to keep things from getting tedious. So Campbell lets us see the dark gathering night behind Joey, and he cleverly uses the lights of the nearby buildings to keep his frames visually interesting. He also makes sure that whenever someone or something falls out of a window or drops off Joey’s platform, we get either an angle that lets us witness the body’s looong way down or a cut that demonstrates how even a stray sponge dropped from a great height can knock someone to the ground.

Some of the more conventional action sequences are also well put-together. One great close-quarters fight set in a boiler room features people getting their faces seared off by punctured steam pipes. Ridley might not bring much dimensionality to Joey as a character, but she does bring a ton of physicality: She looks like she’s having the time of her life getting down and dirty for the film’s myriad beatdowns. Watching Cleaner, one gets the sense that a lot of energy was expended on its action sequences and very little on anything else. Which is perhaps as it should be: In an era when this type of movie is guaranteed a mostly cursory release, we shouldn’t be surprised that a film like this feels so disposable.