The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Back in 2009, when it was announced that David Finch­er was to direct an Amer­i­can adap­ta­tion of Stieg Larsson’s best-sell­ing nov­el ​‘The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too’, it was to be the sec­ond out­ing of indus­tri­al punk anti­heroine Lis­beth Salan­der. Fincher’s ver­sion, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig, fol­lowed the orig­i­nal Swedish film ver­sions (which starred Noo­mi Rapace as Salan­der and Michael Nyqvist as her ally/​sometime lover, jour­nal­ist Mikhail Blomkvist) and was sup­posed to kick off anoth­er fran­chise for Sony.

Despite the crit­i­cal suc­cess of Fincher’s film, sequels were nev­er forth­com­ing, and for a long time there was radio silence on the Amer­i­can Mil­len­ni­um tril­o­gy. Out of Fincher’s ash­es comes a soft reboot: this time fea­tur­ing Claire Foy as Salan­der and Sver­rir Gud­na­son as a younger ver­sion as Blomkvist, with Fede Alvarez (who pre­vi­ous­ly helmed the 2013 Evil Dead remake) on direct­ing duties.

Rather than a direct sequel to The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too (that would be The Girl Who Played with Fire) the film skips ahead to the fourth book in the series (penned by David Lager­crantz fol­low­ing Stieg Larsson’s death). A con­sid­er­able amount of time has passed, and Lis­beth now spends a con­sid­er­able amount of time ​“hurt­ing men who hurt women”. Her unique brand of heavy met­al vig­i­lante jus­tice has made her a want­ed woman, as has atten­tion direct­ed onto her thanks to ex-flame Blomkvist pub­lish­ing details of her exploits in his mag­a­zine. Hired by com­put­er sci­en­tist Frans Balder (played, some­what jar­ring­ly, by Stephen Mer­chant) to steal a com­put­er pro­gramme of his cre­ation from the NSA, Lis­beth inad­ver­tent­ly unleash­es a host of demons from her own past.

A myr­i­ad of sub­plots float in and out of the frame. LaKei­th Stan­field plays Balder’s col­league, Edwin Need­ham, who trav­els to Stock­holm to try and recov­er the stolen com­put­er pro­gramme, Vicky Krieps pops up as Blomkvist’s col­league and lover, while Claes Bang is cast as a bleach-blonde Russ­ian hench­man. That’s a lot of tal­ent to waste, but wast­ed it is giv­en that the entire film revolves pure­ly around Salan­der. That wouldn’t be a prob­lem if Foy was able to bring some­thing to the role, but she feels entire­ly mis­cast as Lis­beth, gri­mac­ing her way through the film as if she’s not entire­ly sure what she’s doing there either.

It’s a shame the film lacks any styl­is­tic inno­va­tion or flair of its own, instead feel­ing like a tame imper­son­ation of Fincher’s 2011 film, even down to a scene where Salan­der exacts rough jus­tice on an abu­sive man. Indeed, it’s dif­fi­cult to eval­u­ate The Girl in the Spider’s Web on its own mer­it when it feels so hope­less­ly tied up in a dif­fer­ent director’s vision. Every­thing about this soft reboot feels one note, and it stands as a dis­ap­point­ing reminder of what could have been if Mara, Craig and Finch­er had stayed on board.