The Girl in the Spider's Web

A long seven years after David Fincher and star Rooney Mara made their Hollywood adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we get the follow up that I don't think audiences were exactly clamoring for.  If they were, they probably won't be hungry for more after they see The Girl in the Spider's Web, a thriller so devoid of feeling, the tone is ice-cold.  That's not to say the film is brutal or hard to watch.  It's just that it leaves absolutely no impression whatsoever, and the stars have zero chemistry up on the screen.

This film, based on the novel by David Lagercrantz (who took over the series of books after the original author, Stieg Larsson, died in 2004), features stock action, a plot that is almost impossible to care about, and a weak interpretation of the series heroine, Lizbeth Salander.  Played in other films by Mara and Noomi Rapace (in the original Swedish language films), this time around we have Claire Foy, who puts on a shaky accent, and just never quite captures the hard edge and sexuality of the character like previous performers.  She simply never grabs your attention whenever she's on the screen.  Sure, she looks the part with her spiky black hair and pitch black leather attire, but she fails to command the screen with her performance, nor does she ever generate any connection with any of her co-stars.  We don't feel for her, because her performance gives us nothing to feel about.

Lizbeth now pretty much comes across as your generic angry butt-kicking woman, who is all attitude and no personality.  As the film opens, she has become a vigilante, striking out against men who hurt women.  The first time we see her, she breaks into the apartment of a powerful businessman who has just beaten his wife, strings him up, tasers him, and then transfers all of his money to his battered wife, who runs off with their kid.  This might have been powerful if Foy had been allowed any sort of emotion during the scene, even anger or perhaps a sense of satisfaction about what she was doing.  When she's not righting the wrongs of evil men, she's hacking the Internet.  She is approached by a recently-fired employee of the National Security Agency (Stephen Merchant), who developed a computer program called FireFall, which can access the world's nuclear weapon codes.  He's now having second thoughts about having developed such a program, and he wants Lizbeth to steal it.

What follows is a pretty standard plot, about a bunch of people who want the program for different reasons, and Lizbeth has to stay ahead of everybody, not knowing who she can trust.  There's a NSA Agent (Lakeith Stanfield from Sorry to Bother You) who is trying to track down who stole the program, as well as some Russian thugs, one of whom has a spider tattoo on his face that turns out to have a personal connection to Lizbeth's past.  There's a mysterious woman (Sylvia Hoeks) dressed all in red who keeps on turning up, and she wants the program too.  Also worked into the story is Mikhail Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason), a reporter who has been Lizbeth's long time friend and partner in her adventures.  This time, he mostly stays on the sidelines, which is probably for the best, as Foy and Gudnason have all the chemistry of a hunk of wood during their scenes together.

The Girl in the Spider's Web simply seems to lack any reason for existing.  Gone is the visual style and the harsh brutality of David Fincher's vision from back in 2011.  Instead, director Fede Alvarez (who made the infinitely better thriller, Don't Breathe, a few years ago) gives us a visually drab winter landscape of grays, blacks and blues that fails to leave any impression on the viewer.  There are no moments of action where the audience catches their breath, no surprises in the narrative itself, and simply no reason for us to care about anything that's going on up on the screen.  The plot is so standard and convoluted, it could have come from any half-baked espionage thriller.  There's simply no identity to be found here.  Combine all of this with the strangely indifferent performances, and you have a movie that simply did not need to be made.

I can only picture the most devoted fan of the series getting something out of this, and even then, I doubt they will get much of anything at all.  If you are someone who has been waiting all this time for Lizbeth Salander to return to the big screen, I apologize.  You deserve better than this.  And judging by what's on display here, you probably won't be seeing her in another movie for quite a long time.

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