Cleaner is a new movie from Martin Campbell that has arrived straight to NowTV in the UK as of last week and feels notable in the fact that it stars Daisy Ridley and is directed by the man responsible for arguably; the two best James Bond films – Goldeneye and Casino Royale. That alone deserves any new Campbell film at least a look; even if his latest films have been less than stellar – the Liam Neeson thriller Memory arrived with a whimper and the less said about The Foreigner the better. You don’t have to mention Green Lantern because Ryan Reynolds has already told you how bad it is.

Here Ridley plays, you guessed it; a high-storey window cleaner at a major London energy company that’s hijacked by radical activists. 300 hostages are taken, and Ridley’s ex-soldier is the only one positioned to act. It’s very Die Hard in structure, essentially just another Die Hard – the movie; remade with a 2020s coat of paint and themes of activism as the enemy – I want to know what the elevator pitch for this one was and “John McClane was a window cleaner at Nakotmi Plaza”? feels entirely derivative. I always go into Campbell movies hoping to have a good time but this one feels very threadbare and entirely forgettable with Clive Owen wasted as a villain.

There’s no real surprises and the high-stakes location is never really made the most of. It feels a touch of forced, low-stakes, motion-running 90-odd minute stop-start thriller that takes too much time to set up its characters and yet at the same time, never gives you a reason to care about any of them because they’re all cookie-cutter. Ridley relishes a meatier role that lets her throw hands, and she’s an action star in the making here – but her track record post The Force Awakens doesn’t do much to alienate the curse that has bogged most Star Wars actors in their post franchise career.

When I saw Clive Owen’s character I was excited but he isn’t given enough of a meaty role to do and there’s a few twists involving his arc that aren’t surprising and in fact, fairly predictable. It feels like a cameo rather than a role of any real substance and seeing Ridley flex her acting chops against Owen would’ve been a lot more interesting than what we ended up having – his role isn’t a walk-on, but it’s not far removed from it. It feels well-polished, missing the grit and the rawness of Die Hard that made it so special – you feel McClane is in danger but you never get the sense that Ridley’s Joey Locke is.

Locke is someone who you get a good sense of who she is in the opener – flawed, always late, always busy, juggling multiple responsibilities at once – but the film never truly lets her grow as a person beyond the standard action movie development. More depth for Locke was need to make her as memorable as McClane.