CLEANER (2025)

Is it too much to expect from a director who gave us such polished action flicks as GoldenEye (1995), The Mask of Zorro (1998) and Casino Royale (2006), to deliver an equally polished action movie now? While Martin Campbell tries his hardest, he misses the mark with his latest film, Cleaner, starring Daisy Ridley as ex-military-turned-window-cleaner Joey Locke. Instead, he delivers a lukewarm Die Hard (1988) knock-off, with considerably less charm despite his star’s dimples and action chops.

The first quarter-hour works hard to establish many things quickly but thankfully avoids dialogue-heavy exposition. Instead, we’re shown through action, which I’ve always preferred. “Show, don’t tell,” as my film teachers in college would always repeat. After a short and effective flashback showing us the family dynamics of our main character (an excellent performance by Poppy Townsend White as a young Joey), and her proclivity for heights, we’re rushed back to the present day.

Joey works as a window cleaner for one of London’s tallest skyscrapers, One Canada Square, and she’s running late for work. She gets an important call which derails her day even more: her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) is being expelled from a care facility (for the umpteenth time, seemingly) for hacking into their systems and exposing their fraud. With no other options and visibly overwhelmed by the responsibility, she drags him to work with her, leaving him with a well-meaning but distracted security guard. After a tense interaction with an executive, Gerald Milton (Lee Boardman), in the elevator, she’s saddled with overtime by her a-hole boss.

Said overtime is how Joey ends up witnessing, from the outside, the violent takeover of a fancy gala thrown by the energy company that owns the building. A group of masked dancers reveal themselves as an eco-terrorist group, helmed by the smooth Marcus (Clive Owen). Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t stay in charge for long; one of his manic, trigger-happy lieutenants, Noah (Taz Skylar), murders him and whoever is still loyal to him before steering the attack into something even more sinister.

The premise of anti-humanist eco-terrorists feels a bit dated, with a script belonging to the 2010s. For example, to explain the stakes to Michael, Joey references Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019). Thanos’s counterpart is Noah, a ruthless villain who believes “the end justifies the means”. He doesn’t aim to save humanity, but to get rid of it to save Mother Earth; so instead of being morally grey and ambiguous, Cleaner overshoots straight into psychopathic tendencies. (Thanos wasn’t much better, to be clear, but he was also an eight-foot-tall purple alien.) It tries to make us sympathetic to Noah’s cause, relying on Skylar’s charisma and using dialogue which has many other characters concede that he has a point and humanity is the problem. The nuance is left unexplored: if Noah has a point, but his anti-humanist way isn’t the answer, then what? They missed an opportunity to find the proper balance by dispatching the group’s original leader Marcus, who had a much stronger moral fibre (as much as a terrorist can, at any rate), so early on in the movie.

Where Die Hard portrayed law enforcement as impulsive meat-heads, Cleaner gives us a firm and efficient chief of police, Claire Hume (Ruth Gemmell). Just like John and Al Powell developed a fast friendship over CB, Claire and Joey create a bond as the latter becomes the man on the inside, helping the police take down Noah’s crew. It takes a while before Joey makes it back inside, though, which becomes slightly frustrating.

Ridley had already demonstrated her leading action star chops with her turn in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and she’s at ease in the role of Joey. She has the charm and the physicality to pull it off, so it’s a shame that the script doesn’t give her the dialogue to go with her talent (and strands her character outside the building for half of the movie’s runtime). Joey is not as flamboyantly emotional as John McClane: she’s more focused and cool-tempered, with less dry one-liners and theatrics, but a lot of expletives nonetheless. That is until it comes to her brother, who’s trapped inside with the bad guys.

Ridley and Tuck make a wonderful sibling duo and share great scenes where their bond is undeniable. I still find it incredibly refreshing when a hero’s motivations are something other than romantic love, or simply trying to save the world. There’s nothing wrong with either of those, but they’ve been the default for so long that they feel disingenuous. We all want to believe we would lay our lives down for the rest of humanity, but most of us will never come close to such a situation. It hits much closer to home when we’re presented with bonds that hit closer to home. Family, whether biological or chosen, holds a monumental place in everyone’s lives and makes for compelling motivation.

Visually, the film is bland. Apart from some vertigo-inducing scenes on the cradle used by the cleaners, there’s not much excitement to be had for direction or photography. Some effects are downright botched, such as Marcus’ corpse being an obvious dummy after it’s thrown out the window onto Joey. Cleaner has little of the refinement of Campbell’s earlier Bond instalments and instead is camped firmly into B-movie territory. There’s no nuance to any of the bigger subjects being addressed, despite there being space and time for them; after all, Cleaner runs a tidy 98-minutes. Some gunfights could’ve been cut in favour of storytelling similar to what the first few minutes introduced. A movie about morally grey issues and ethical conundrums should treat the viewer as capable of handling those subjects, and dive into them rather than skim over the surface for cheap action. An action movie can be both thrilling and profound, just as any movie can be both art and entertainment.

UK | 2025 | 98 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Martin Campbell.
writers: Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams & Matthew Orton.
starring: Daisy Ridley, Taz Skylar, Clive Owen, Matthew Tuck, Flavia Watson, Ruth Gemmell, Ray Fearon, Rufus Jones, Richard Hope & Lee Boardman.