‘Cleaner’ Review: Daisy Ridley Deserves Better, And So Do You

Daisy Ridley has so much promise. She’s a talented, thoughtful actress who galvanized fans as Rey in three Star Wars films (with more to come). She’s good at action and equally skilled with quieter, emotional scenes. But in recent years, Ridley has not always had the best luck selecting projects. Her turn last year as real-life swimmer Gertrude Ederle in The Young Woman and the Sea was notably strong, but movies like Sometimes I Think About Dying, The Marsh King’s Daughter and Magpie haven’t done Ridley much justice. Enter Cleaner, perhaps now the worst film on her IMDb page. 

In the high-stakes thriller, directed by talented action filmmaker Martin Campbell, the British actress plays a literal window cleaner named Joey Locke. She comes from a broken home and now helps to support her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck). She dropped out of the British Army and struggles to keep her finances in order, despite having a job in a real-life glossy London skyscraper, One Canada Square. We see a flashback of her childhood where she climbs outside her tall apartment building window while her dad beats Michael—a shortcut way of telling the audience that she’s not afraid of heights and also kind of a bad sibling. 

Jump to present day, as Michael is kicked out of his care home, which makes Joey late for work. Her boss isn’t pleased, sending her outside to help fellow cleaner Noah (Taz Skylar) with a few terse words. He’s so displeased, in fact, that he strands her dangling on an upper floor to scrub a dead bird off the glass. It’s while she tirelessly scrapping bird off the window that a gala held by Agnian Energy is hijacked by a gang of eco-terrorists called Earth Revolution. The terrorists take over the security level, putting a bullet in Joey’s boss, and knock out everyone inside the building with some kind of gas. Only the executives from Agnian are kept awake because the terrorists’ leader Marcus (Clive Owen) needs them to confess their environmental sins on camera. 

Joey is witness to the hijacking and to the fact that Noah is one of the eco-terrorists. His motives may be the worst of them all, and he quickly sets Joey up to appear as the villain, forcing her to shoot a gun onto the street below (a scene that absolutely does not add up narratively). Soon she’s targeted by the London police as she hangs off the side of the building. Bridgerton favorite Ruth Gemmell plays Claire Hume, head of the police force and seemingly the only sane person attempting to stop the hijacking. Claire and Joey eventually form a rapport over the phone as Claire realizes that the real threat is coming from inside the tower. The action that ensues as Joey attempts to save the day is decent, with a few good fight scenes, but the general premise is so preposterous that it’s difficult to suspend your disbelief. It’s also hard to stomach environmental supporters as the antagonists and a corrupt energy firm as those who need saving in an era of dire climate emergency. 

Campbell is responsible for good movies like Casino Royale and Vertical Limit, and he knows how to stage a taut action sequence. But here he’s constrained by a muddled script from Simon Uttley, a writer who has written a few similarly-toned screenplays before. Joey’s backstory is melodramatic and psychologically simplistic, and not enough tension is drawn from the setting of a perilous skyscraper. We never really feel that Joey is in danger, even when she’s slipping from her window washing platform. The dizzying heights should be a secondary antagonist, but the threat isn’t pushed far enough to make the audience nervous—this is certainly not Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol with Tom Cruise single-handedly hanging off the Burj Khalifa. Even the film’s title lacks a much-needed punch. Ridley is a strong action heroine, but she deserves better material than this.