Daisy Ridley's Cleaner is the Best Die Hard Replacement on Prime Video - MCE Notices | California State Portal

There is a specific kind of movie that the theatrical release calendar has no patience for anymore, and it is the lean, high-concept action thriller with no existing fanbase. These movies are shot in a single location, built on practical tension, and have one big bad and a compelling good guy carrying the show. In 1988, the movie was Die Hard, and in 2025, it is Daisy Ridley-starrer Cleaner.

Martin Campbell’s action thriller opened in US theaters on February 21, 2025, and grossed a measly $1.3 million at the box office against a $25 million budget. It had decent reviews, but slipped away from screens within mere weeks. Then it hit digital rental platforms, where it has been climbing steadily up the charts, hitting the Top 10 Movies on Prime Video in several regions globally.

Cleaner Has All The Makings Of An Action Classic

Cleaner revolves around a classic premise: a group of radical activists seizes an energy company’s annual gala at One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, taking 300 hostages to expose corporate corruption. Their cause is legitimate, but their methods fracture when an extremist within the group decides that mass murder will send a louder message. The one person positioned to stop him is Joey Locke, an ex-soldier who was dishonorably discharged and now works as a window cleaner outside the building.

She is suspended 50 storeys above London, with her older brother Michael among the hostages inside. She has no backup, no authority, and no way in except the one she makes for herself. The building is a trap, and the window cleaner is the only way out.

The “isolated hero” subgenre has one canonical text, and everything else is measured against it. John McClane, barefoot and outnumbered in Nakatomi Plaza, is the template. He is the everyman protagonist dropped into an impossible situation, surviving not through superhuman ability but through resourcefulness, pain tolerance, and resilience above all else.

Every Die Hard clone since 1988 has been trying to replicate the exact alchemical balance of that formula, which involves a vulnerable and believable hero and a mounting physical cost that makes every victory feel earned. Most attempts fail at the first hurdle, which is the vulnerability. Action cinema has spent three decades trend-cycling between unstoppable killing machines and self-consciously fragile protagonists, rarely finding the middle ground that McClane occupied so naturally.

What Cleaner gets right, and what elevates it above the conveyor belt of single-location thrillers that disappear into the streaming ether, is that Daisy Ridley’s Joey Locke is genuinely and persistently in danger. She is not invincible, and she takes damage often. Throughout the runtime of Cleaner, Joey is operating on the extreme edge of her capability, and the film is honest enough not to rescue her with sudden surges of action-hero competence out of convenience.

The location, too, does enormous work. Hanging 50 storeys above London on the exterior of a glass skyscraper is not a setting that permits comfortable gun battle rhythms or most action cinema. The geometry is too vertical, too exposed, and too dependent on specific skills that Joey has, and most other people don’t. It forces the viewer to feel a certain kind of spatial anxiety that the best action cinema generates almost accidentally (and some don’t generate it at all).

Clive Owen’s villain completes the Die Hard equation, with his cold and purposeful energy that matches Hans Gruber’s genuinely threatening presence. Owen’s Marcus Blake is ideologically committed in ways that make him more dangerous than a straightforward mercenary. His screen time is more limited than the billing suggests, but he uses it efficiently.

Why Streaming Gives Films Like Cleaner a Second Chance

Image via Sky Cinema

The theatrical failure of Cleaner is not a mystery. February 2025 was not a hospitable environment for a mid-budget British action thriller without a franchise hook, distributed by Quiver Distribution rather than a major studio. It carried no IP recognition and had minimal marketing spend.

The theatrical release calendar in 2025 continued its post-pandemic consolidation around titles that could justify their screen count with opening weekend numbers that mid-budget genre films generally cannot produce. Cleaner wasn’t built to win that game.

Streaming, however, changes the game entirely. On Prime Video’s charts, a film like Cleaner competes on completely different terms, and not against the opening-weekend box office gravity of whatever franchise film happened to be released on the same weekend. Cleaner, in this case, has to work against the browsing habits of action fans looking to watch something on a Tuesday night.

In those conditions, a lean, 97-minute thriller with a highly recognizable lead, a high-concept premise, and a Die Hard pedigree baked into its DNA is an easy sell. The algorithm finds the audience, and the film grips them firmly for just over one and a half hours, easily.

This is the second chance that Cleaner has been given, and the film is good enough to deserve it. The movie is not genre-transcending, but it recreates the thrill of a Die Hard-esque, isolated-hero format pretty well. IT delivers a tense, well-staged, and grounded action-thriller built on a committed central performance by Daisy Ridley and directed by a veteran filmmaker (Casino Royale, GoldenEye) who knows the material.

Daisy Ridley, too, doesn’t just run on Star Wars residue here. She is doing something considerably more difficult by building a character from scratch, in a genre that is fundamentally dominated by men. Ridley doesn’t have a huge ensemble or set pieces to bolster her performance, and her isolated-hero act makes her carry the entire weight of the film on her shoulders. She brings to Joey a groundedness that makes her relatable.

She is an action heroine who is rather real: she’s tired, financially stretched, and motivated not by a grand destiny, but the simple fact that her brother, Michael, who has a disability and whose care facility placement has just fallen through, is inside the building, and she is the only one who can reach him. This is a smaller-scale, but much grittier performance for Ridley, and she makes Cleaner into a one-of-a-kind action film with it.