The Girl in the Spider’s Web

The mystique of Lisbeth Salander—that iconic, proto-feminist hacker turned crusader against the evil that men do—has been mostly sidelined in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a disappointingly routine action picture that miscalculates by diminishing Salander’s knife-edged persona, her propensity for dispensing grim justice and importantly, the undertow of moral and human complexity in its mystery.

Recasting the character as an action heroine, director and co-writer Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe) works overtime, quickly and loudly, to put Salander through the paces of some quite tired espionage mechanics which lead, of all things, to that laziest of movie thriller favorites—the theft of nuclear launch codes and relentless pursuit to get them back. Such a disposable plot wastes the talents of star Claire Foy and the goodwill of her beloved character when Tom Cruise, or Daniel Craig, would have done just fine (and have on many an occasion).

Based on David Lagercrantz’s novel conceived after the death of series creator Stieg Larsson, picture involves one of those coveted computer programs with the power to destroy the world. Remember when such programs were on 3.5 diskettes? That’s how long this movie trope has been around. At this point in modern action movies (and a history of Bond) we should ask ourselves why anyone, ever, would want world domination so badly that…they’d like to destroy it.

Anyway, Salander—this time played by Claire Foy, taking up the mantle from Swedish hellcat Noomi Rapace and subdued successor Rooney Mara—impresses in an early scene where she strings up an unfaithful, corrupt wife beater and dismantles his marriage, finances and reputation in about a minute flat. So far, so good.

Picture quickly goes off track with the theft of Firefall, said computer program that somehow integrates global missile defense systems—that should be easy to develop on Wix—and everybody seems to want it. Salander, hired to hack into the computer system of American NSA agent Ed Needham (solid Lakeith Stanfield, a bright spot), finds no problem stealing the program but holding onto it is another issue.

Of course, Needham can pinpoint her Stockholm IP, or something like that, and quickly gives chase. But Firefall has already been stolen from Salander and is in enemy hands—and this time, it’s personal as they say, because those hands are Salander’s long presumed dead sister (Sylvia Hoeks), a whitewashed blonde who dresses in red to produce a starkly appealing contrast with the picture’s chilly snowscapes and grays, whites and blues that comprise the cold palette.

Chases pile up along with outrageous tech-craft, explosions that send Salander into boiling bathtubs, a child genius and mathematical savant, escalating body counts and I haven’t even mentioned the tepid “love” interest, journalist Mikael Blomkvist (a wan Sverrir Gudnason), whose pairing with Salander has always been the series’ ironic, askew symmetry. This time there’s zero spark, little screen time together and while we’re told Blomkvist has made his career on Salander profiles, they hardly seem to know each other given their considerable shared history. The movie also trots our Lisbeth’s apparent bisexuality but doesn’t stop to explore in any meaningful way.

Foy, note perfect in everything else, is surprisingly unmemorable here—and you can blame the by-the-numbers screenplay by Alvarez and Steven Knight adapting from Lagercrantz’s novel in a textbook case of diminishing returns. She gives it her all, especially in the physical combat scenes, but there’s nothing substantive to hold onto here. You don’t deploy as fascinating a character as Lisbeth Salander to fight the theft of nuclear launch codes—you just don’t.

In two hours of The Girl in the Spider’s Web I counted one moment of visual flair involving a suctioning rubber suit, a semi-passable action scene on a bridge and one smart exchange between two characters standing atop a cliff—and that was about all that worked.

2 stars.