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.
