Friday, April 12, 2019

The Girl In the Spider's Web (2018)


THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB  (2018)  
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    D: Fede Alvarez
    Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith Stanfield,
    Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant, Christopher Convey,
    Vicky Krieps, Cameron Britton, Synnove Macody Lund
Lisbeth Salander hacks into the National Security Agency and downloads the computer program for a high-tech weapons system its geek creator wants to destroy. The Americans want it back, Swedish intelligence is after it, and so is a Russian organization called the Spiders, who aren't exactly out to promote world peace. This is the first Salander feature not based on a Stieg Larsson novel, and while the book, by David Lagercrantz, wasn't bad, the story's way too involved to track all the way if you don't know something about it going in. You get lots of scenes where characters conveniently turn up in the right place at the right time, with no hint at how they knew where to go or how to get there. Claire Foy's a very good actress, but she's wrong for Salander. She's too open and expressive. Salander's deeply fucked up, a damaged, angry soul who keeps her emotions locked up tight below the surface. Both Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara did a better job of capturing that. They had a tougher edge. Sverrir Gudnason as Mikael Blomkvist doesn't do any better. He's younger than either Michael Nyqvist or Daniel Craig, and it's not hard to imagine him hooking up with Salander, but he barely has a role to play in the story, and for Larsson a key part of the dynamic between the two (not always stated) was their age differential. There's an attraction there that's intense, and from time to time they act on it, but they both know that in too many ways they don't match up. This time out, they hardly connect at all. They never get the chance. With the edges smoothed off and the accent on stunts and effects, this "Dragon Tattoo" entry is less a character study than a formula action movie, and the world already has plenty of those. Fans of the books and the previous films are likely to be unimpressed.