Lisbeth Salander, your #MeToo moment has arrived: If ever there was a perfect time for the avenging hacker of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ series to make a rebooted comeback, it’s now. So call it a spectacular failure to read the room that the new action-tooled ‘The Girl in the Spider’s Web’ strips its hero of everything that made her spiky and singular.
It’s not that the movie doesn’t have a terrific lead (‘The Crown’s Claire Foy, who knows from mining subtle shades of rebellion) or a sleek visual template, established by David Fincher in 2011 with his Rooney Mara-led ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Problematically, ‘Spider’s Web’ sees nothing to celebrate in Salander but a bland video-game avatar, someone who speeds across icy ponds on her Ducati, flees explosions in slo-mo and barely gets it on (one listless same-sex sleepover with a club kid hardly counts). Foy wasn’t made to frown at laptops; what little psychology there is in Lisbeth has been scaled back to nothing.
Worse, she’s up against one of those generic madman-steals-a-nuke-app scenarios that went out with Roger Moore. When Salander’s nemesis shows up – such meager pleasures shouldn’t be spoiled – she’s another woman, clad fully in red like a supervillain. Did it have to end with a color-coded catfight? Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez has the stylish ‘Don’t Breathe’ under his belt, but his pivot to the big leagues is inauspicious, dumbing everything down and wasting his shot.
