Daisy Ridley & Taz Skylar Elevate the 'Cleaner'

If you haven’t been paying attention to Daisy Ridley’s career since she last played Rey in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, then you’ve missed out on the joy of watching the actress prove her talents in a series of really interesting roles in a variety of genres. In 2024 alone, she did award-worthy work embodying polar opposites, first as Olympian swimmer Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle in the underrated biopic Young Woman and the Sea and then as the cuckolded wife Annette in Magpie (in which she also came up with the story). 

To start 2025, she’s embracing her inner action heroine again to great effect in director Martin Campbell’s (Casino Royale) contemporary Die Hard riff, Cleaner. Set in London, Ridley plays Joey Locke, a former British Army soldier whose current existence is perennially on the back foot. Chronically late and scattered, she tries to make ends meet as a high-rise window washer, but that often butts up against the chaos of caretaking emergencies involving her adult autistic brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck). 

On probation at work, Joey is forced to bring him with her to sit through her shift in the lobby as she’s needed to make the Agnian Energy floor of windows extra sparkly for the company’s annual gala that evening. A normal day hanging from the exterior of the building with a squeegee turns into a waking nightmare when the big party is invaded by a group of extreme environmentalists led by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) and his crew of like-minded disruptors. They’ve set their sights on bringing down the Miltons, the distasteful Agnian co-owners Geoffrey (Rufus Jones) and Gerald (Lee Boardman), along with their guest list of powerful corrupt enablers hiding the company’s environmental crimes. 

Marcus takes the whole floor hostage, planning to expose the family. Unfortunately, Michael sneaks into the upper floors of the building to find a charger, forcing Joey to figure out a way to get from outside the building to inside without getting caught in the crossfire. 

As many have already observed, the Cleaner screenplay by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams (Broadchurch), and Matthew Orton (Moon Knight) is the spiritual and structural cousin to director John McTiernan’s 1988 Die Hard. That classic featured New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist takeover of a Los Angeles skyscraper. The Cleaner differs plenty: it’s not a Christmas movie; it doesn’t have a comedic underpinning; and Joey’s involvement is purely circumstantial, so there’s less of a moral imperative about stopping the bad guys. 

In truth, Joey isn’t much of a hero, and the film makes that clear as she still wrestles with her pattern of quitting or looking the other way instead of standing her ground in the past. Ridley is ideally suited to conveying that kind of interior conflict with her expressive face, and that humanizes Joey as the stakes get higher. Having her be vulnerable and flawed while focused on her micro-personal goal of saving Michael tempers the character from slipping into implausible superhero territory. Instead, Joey overcomes the increasingly scary threats with her wits and a reasonable ex-military skill set, which keeps the film grounded and believable despite its high-concept premise. 

Bolstering Ridley’s centering performance is some excellent work from Taz Skylar (The Lazarus Project) as her window washer pal, Noah, and Ruth Gemmell (Bridgerton) as Superintendent Claire Hume, who is heading the police’s crisis response from the ground. I was already impressed by Skylar’s work as the charming pirate Sanji in Netflix’s live-action One Piece series, but here he shows new facets to his talent that has me excited about what he takes on next. Gemmell’s take on the steely female cop in charge is appreciated as she becomes Joey’s pragmatic advocate as the hostage situation gets more and more fraught. 

While the terrorists in the building scenario here possess some logic problems — like just how many other companies or residents also exist in this building and why there isn’t more chaos on other floors — overall the Cleaner script is well constructed and thankfully doesn't rely on dumb antagonists or sloppy protagonist tropes. In fact, the moral quandary that inspires the takeover is extremely timely and will provoke the audience to question their own sympathies which adds some welcome moral shades of grey to the overall hostage scheme. 

Action-wise, Campbell’s directing chops haven’t diminished since his Bond days. He executes a taut thriller here, peppered with some exciting hand-to-hand combat scenes and thrilling moments of peril as Joey hangs from her cleaning cradle. There’s a clever blending of exterior photography and VFX extensions that makes the film feel very practical and that in itself is a breath of fresh air for a modern action film. And you can’t ask for a better lead than Ridley, who sells the physicality of Joey’s skills, which matches the ‘90s action vibe Campbell is going for. The Cleaner isn’t reinventing the hostage thriller playbook, but this is a well-put-together and entertaining throwback worth a watch.

Cleaner is playing in U.S. theaters starting Friday, February 21, 2025.