Film Review: The Girl In The Spider's Web

Directed and co-written by Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez (happier with the equally murky Evil Dead remake and the sleeper hit Don’t Breathe), this has Foy filling in as Lisbeth Salander in place of Noomi Rapace (from the Swedish film series) and Rooney Mara (in the ill-fated American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). And she’s pretty good too: grungier and more feral than the somewhat glamourous Noomi and rougher and tougher than Rooney, who was so emaciated in the role that you feared she was going to faint any minute.

Still, Larsson wouldn’t be pleased with how the character has been retooled as a sort of shadowy avenger given to flights of Jason Bourne and even James Bond-type fancy.

An important flashback opens the film where the young Lisbeth (Beau Gadsdon) tries to save her sister Camilla (Carlotta von Falkenhayn) from their sexual predator Dad, and then we take up in Stockholm three months after the events of Dragon Tattoo (and The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest?). Foy’s Lisbeth is now an avenging angel who improbably uses her computer hacking know-how to defend women who, like her, have been abused, and we begin with an audience-pleasing setpiece that’s spectacularly unlikely.

Lisbeth then finds herself in trouble again when she agrees to help an NSA employee named Frans Balder (and he’s played by funnyman Stephen Merchant, best-known for his work with Ricky Gervais). It seems that Balder (who comes complete with a frightened autistic son) has created the program Firefall, which can take control of any nuclear missile system in the world, and now he’s realised that such a thing is quite dangerous (duh!) and he wants Lisbeth to steal it and hide it (or something).

Balder winds up thinking he’s safe with protection from the Swedish Secret Service (duh!) while Lisbeth, barely surviving a bomb blast, must make contact with that dreary journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Sevrrir Gudnason weakly filling in for the since-late Michael Nyqvist in the Swedish series and Daniel Craig in the remake). They start nosing around wondering about a secret organisation that carves spider tattoos on unfortunates’ foreheads, and then, after much running around against grim, wintry backdrops, a personal aspect is thrown in that causes Lisbeth to almost actually feel something.

All a bit hard to follow at times and with surprisingly obvious FX sequences, this is as grey as the Swedish winter and at times so dark that you dearly wish someone – anyone – would turn a damn light on. And just about all the characters except Lisbeth are dull, with Gudnason’s Mikael pretty much painful in his blandness. Why would a character as interesting as Lisbeth be so ridiculously obsessed with this hopeless nitwit? Surely she’d hop right back on her motorbike and get the Hell out to find someone more exciting?