Cleaner (2025)

Moderately gripping ‘Cleaner’ wants desperately to be a new ‘Die Hard’. Opening in theaters February 21st is ‘Cleaner,’ directed by Martin Campbell and starring Daisy Ridley, Matthew Tuck, Taz Skylar, Ruth Gemmell, Flavia Watson, and Clive Owen. Everything old is new again. Well, sort of. We love a good action thriller, and we’re aware that the genre has certain tropes and conventions that usually crop up in most movies of this kind, but ‘Cleaner’ takes it one step further.

While many of the plot details are changed, this is a pretty brazen remake of ‘Die Hard,’ with a lone person – in this case a woman, played by Daisy Ridley of ‘Star Wars’ fame – battling terrorists who capture a corporate skyscraper and take the people inside as hostages.