Movie review: 'The Girl in the Spider's Web' spins misconceived sequel to 'Dragon Tattoo'
“The Girl in the Spider's Web” - ★ ★
“The Girl in the Spider's Web” wastes no time in establishing itself as one of the most misconceived movie sequels ever made.
It begins with a flashback to a pivotal moment when a young Lisbeth Salander tries to coax her sister Camilla to escape from their sexually abusive father.
Camilla can't.
So, a desperate Lisbeth deliberately falls off the side of their mountaintop house overlooking miles of Sweden's snowy forests.
An aerial camera shows her long, long descent, her snowy impact upon the earth, and her instant, triumphant run for freedom through the trees.
This isn't a sequel to the dark and blisteringly realistic “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” It's a Road Runner cartoon with Lisbeth as Wile E. Coyote taking a comically impossible fall.
Yet, this opening scene accurately sets the tone for Fede Alvarez's James Bond-style save-the-world shenanigans.
Claire Foy, star of “The Crown” and the current “First Man,” inherits the complex role of the conflicted Lisbeth from Rooney Mara in David Fincher's “Dragon Tattoo” and Noomi Rapace in the original three Swedish movies based on Stieg Larsson's “Millennium” novels.
Foy clearly possesses the acting chops to handle Lisbeth's demanding challenges.
But she has to fight for character development against a series of logic-defying action set pieces and a generic screenplay that reduces her quirky, spiky, face-painted, black-leather-clad feminist avenger into an eharmony.com matchup for Brandon Lee's “The Crow.”
The 007-like plot of “The Girl in the Spider's Web” kicks in when Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), former employee of the U.S.'s National Security Agency, asks Lisbeth to steal FireFall, a program that can access nuclear weapon codes, from the NSA he no longer trusts.
Easy-peasy for the computer hacker.
But when her computer containing FireFall gets stolen during a fiery home invasion, Lisbeth has only one clue: a photo of a man with a mysterious spiderweb tattoo that she instantly traces to a secret Russian gang.
The only person who might know the FireFall access code to reveal all the other access codes is Balder's young, math genius son August (Christopher Convery), taken into protective custody by Gabriella Grane (Synnøve Macody Lund), deputy director of Sweden's Secret Service.
The movie's big non-surprise occurs during a cartoony chase scene on a bridge where Lisbeth's presumed-dead, now evil sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks) reveals herself in a stunning fire-engine-red outfit that burns against cinematographer Pedro Luque Briozzo's color-bled scenes of cold Swedish landscapes.
Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason makes a bland replacement for Daniel Craig's dynamic journalist Mikael Blomkvist in Fincher's film.
Lakeith Stanfield looks sufficiently annoyed as NSA agent Edwin Needham, on an official “vacation” to recover the stolen FireFall.
“The Spider's Web,” based on a new book by David Lagercrantz, blunts the sharp, specific edges that made Fincher's film and the Swedish series raw and memorable.
How sad that Lisbeth's iconic heroine motivated by sexual abuse to seek justice for women has been recast as a goth superhero in an action movie for 15-year-old boys.
<b>Starring:</b> Claire Foy, Sylvia Hoeks, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith Stanfield, Christopher Convery
<b>Directed by:</b> Fede Alvarez
<b>Other:</b> A Columbia Pictures release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 117 minutes