Film Review: CLEANER (2025): Daisy Ridley Gets Stuck in a Formulaic Action Picture

Cleaner Review

Cleaner (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by Martin Campbell, written by Matthew Orton, Simon Uttley and Paul Andrew Williams and starring Daisy Ridley, Clive Owen, Matthew Tuck, Taz Skylar, Ray Fearon, Lee Boardman, Richard Hope, Rufus Jones, Stella Stocker, Akie Kotabe, Celine Arden, Flavia Watson, Melissa Humler, Regina Seifert, David Cheung and Poppy Townsend White.

Cleaner is a routine British action picture directed by a former James Bond movie director, Martin Campbell. It feels like it has a lower budget than your typical action movie and isn’t being released by a major movie studio which makes me wonder if this project had enough potential to justify its existence in the first place. They’ve cast the always terrific Daisy Ridley as a woman named Joey Locke who is late for work when we first meet her as an adult. She’s a window cleaner. This movie actually opens with a young Joey climbing out her window and sitting on the ledge of her high-rise building when things get scary with her family. She’s tough and can rise to the occasion when need be. Cleaner tries to put together a clever scenario but it’s undermined by its lackluster plot and disappointing characterizations.

Joey has an autistic brother named Micheal (Matthew Tuck) who is getting kicked out of a home and thus tagging along with Joey as she makes her way to her 2 o’clock shift at her job. Her boss warns her not to be late or he’ll fire her. Joey gets help with Micheal while she attends to working her shift. Meanwhile, Clive Owen is featured as Marcus, a bad guy who leads a group in taking over the high-rise building showcased in the picture. Ridley’s Joey is foul-mouthed and loving at the same time. She occasionally gives her brother a squeeze (also known as a hug) and has a military background that gives her a very particular set of skills to help stop the terrorists the movie introduces to the audience.

While 300 hostages are taken by Owen’s character’s crew, it’s up to Joey to try to take matters into her own hands to defuse the situation and save lives. Marcus’s partner in crime is Noah (Taz Skylar) who is just as hostile as a villain can be and the movie builds to the fight between Joey and Noah which audiences will anxiously await given the dynamics of their characters. Die Hard feels like the new movie’s inspiration but Cleaner doesn’t live up the standards set by that old Bruce Willis starrer. That’s thanks mostly to the writing, not the acting. Though the screenplay that is employed here is intriguing at first, it never really delivers in the way a good action picture should.

Ruth Gemmell serves as a police officer who teams up with Joey to help take care of the very dire situation the movie proposes. However, that bond only opens up time-filling conversations that drag the movie down rather than make it more exciting at times. One major action sequence has Ridley’s Joey sending a woman through the window and out of the building in a way that can only be provided by an over-the-top film such as this one.

Micheal is the movie’s weakest link. His interaction with Joey isn’t that believable and the picture puts in too many situations that feel tailor-made to fit the needs of the plot rather than to make it more plausible and entertaining. Ridley and Tuck are both good in their roles but are stuck with dialogue that feels like it hasn’t been polished enough for a film like this one.

Daisy Ridley nevertheless makes for an interesting action heroine. She has a lot of spunk and it’s easy to see her as a foe for the villains the movie employs in its plot. Ridley is adequate here even though this film doesn’t feature the best type of performance for the actress. Let me scratch that- the movie doesn’t even come close to featuring Ridley’s best work and that’s a shame because she’ done some compelling films lately like Young Woman and the Sea.

Cleaner is, for the most part, a run-of-the-mill and by-the-numbers action film. You can telegraph each scene that happens just by having seen other movies of this type before. There are plenty of action set pieces but none of them really deliver memorable adrenaline although the sequences are sometimes interesting to watch in the moment. While the setting of this film’s principal action was well-chosen, and the movie feels like it knows what it wants to do, it’s no Die Hard.

Ridley does give her role the most development that is found in the entire movie. Though her brother has some character growth as well, it is the window cleaner played by Ridley that is at the center of the movie and the bad guys she faces off with are adequate- nothing more, nothing less.

If Cleaner is mostly tightly edited, it’s also a Die Hard-inspired type of film at its core, and it’s not a good movie in comparison. Owen’s screen time is much less than what his fans will want in addition to the fact that Owen isn’t as menacing as he could have been. Clearner does feature wall-to-wall action, and some people may be forgiving enough of the movie’s flaws to enjoy watching this fast-paced action/adventure yarn. Just be warned that this movie’s tale is one as old as cinema and the action meanders more than it succeeds, unfortunately. There is a good song played at the end credits, however, that has potential appeal for feel-good music fans.

Rating: 5.5/10

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