Set atop one of the U.K.’s tallest buildings, Cleaner hangs star Daisy Ridley out to dry. Ridley plays Joey Locke, a discharged soldier turned window washer, dangling from the side of One Canada Square, a 50-story skyscraper, as a band of eco-terrorists, led by Marcus Black (a mustache-twirling Clive Owen, who’s in this much less than one expects), holds an oil company gala hostage. A veteran director, like, say, Martin Campbell, could elevate Cleaner’s clichéd premise with some imagination or, at the very least, a workman’s sense of execution. Yet, Campbell seems satisfied with straight-to-Redbox mediocrity.
Creeping around walls, cabinets, and windowsills since childhood, Joey was born to wash windows. Coupled with her military expertise, she’s in the right place at the right time to stop terrorists, direct from Gotham City, who take hold of the building with canisters of knock-out gas. Black wants to force a confession out of slimy oil oligarchs Gerald (Lee Boardman) and Geoffrey Milton (Rufus Jones), who he charges with the assassination of a whistleblower. Nipping a “the villain is right” problem in the bud, the trio of screenwriters—Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton—up the ante by making the terrorists anti-humanists, hoping to accelerate humankind’s extinction so nature can heal. Cleaner uses this unnecessary complication to dissuade the audience from sympathizing with the baddies. It’s not enough.
Sold as a Die Hard riff, Cleaner’s real hook is where our would-be McClane is stowing away. Ridley spends a third of the movie on the side of One Canada Square, first on her deteriorating lift and, later, on a window frame no more than a few inches wide. With her platform slowly shrinking, Joey remains confined away from the action as Cleaner delays the inevitable. Yet, it doesn’t have much for her to do over this extended story beat other than talk to hostages and terrorists who bother to visit her window, bang on glass, and strike up a talkie-based friendship with Superintendent Claire Hume (Ruth Gemmell), the Reginald VelJohnson to Ridley’s Bruce Willis. With her face against the glass, Joey argues with the crew’s true believer, Noah (Taz Skylar), and pleads with her neurodivergent brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), to hide.
Despite hanging 700 feet in the air, Campbell labors to realize the precarity of the situation. He can mount a thrilling action scene, having reloaded the Bond chamber twice, with GoldenEye and Casino Royale. Still, he can’t muster a hint of vertigo here, losing his fundamentals in a flurry of exposition. Joey must clean a “bird strike on floor 51, panel F51P118,” an info dump that might as well be custodial cockney slang and does little to create a spatial relationship between the cleaner and her goal. Her distance from the ground is even more amorphous, as the film’s weak compositing effects sell out its biggest asset. Campbell shows little to no ingenuity in framing his massive setting, mainly offering a series of close-ups that belie our hero’s danger. Regardless, it doesn’t matter if she’s on the 51st, 13th, or 72nd floor, because we have no idea where the action inside is taking place, or how far Joey is from it.
Ridley does successfully hold the center of the film—even if she’s sequestered from much of the action. When she finally breaks inside, the film jolts to life as Campbell relishes in shooting the cleanly composed close combat that the movie sorely lacks. Recalling and improving upon her Jedi training, Ridley, who reportedly did many of her own stunts, is up for the challenge. Campbell captures her crisp fight choreography with unshowy direction, highlighting an actor, not a stunt double, performing these precision moves. So why aren’t there more of them, and why aren’t there more original gags? Campbell never finds anything idiosyncratic about his unique location, proving another disappointing fact of late capitalism: All locations look the same.
Cleaner’s few original flourishes come and go too quickly. An early twist briefly throws the movie off-axis, but the script has no follow-up. Its most compelling subplot, Joey and Michael’s fraught relationship, offers a slight variation on action movie heroism, swapping “repairing romances” for “sibling caregiving.” But Michael gets lost in the shuffle, disappearing for large swaths of the film until absolutely necessary. This would be forgivable if the movie were at least funny. But “bibbidi bobbidi bye bye” ain’t no “yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.” Groaners like that need charisma, but Campbell can’t find any swagger in the script’s scant charms.
Cleaner is a perfectly serviceable time waster for plane rides and afternoon naps. It might even make a good addition to Daisy Ridley’s acting reel, should anyone think of her for a better action movie. But Campbell’s timid direction of a tired script can’t rise to the occasion. Sure, it’s a big building, but why does this movie seem so small?
Director: Martin Campbell
Writers: Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, Matthew Orton
Stars: Daisy Ridley, Taz Skylar, Clive Owen
Release Date: February 21, 2025
