Movie Review: "The Girl in the Spider’s Web" Turns Lisbeth Into a Straight-Up Scandi Superhero

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is good enough, if you don’t mind that Lisbeth Salander is basically Batman now.

Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy centered on vengeful Swedish hacker Lisbeth Salander, is dead. Don’t panic: he’s been dead for almost fifteen years. Yet not even death could contain his most famous creation, because here comes The Girl in the Spider’s Web, based on a 2015 novel by David Lagercrantz, which gives Lisbeth a new adventure to embark on, and new men’s nards to tase.

The first three Larsson novels were turned into a series of fairly tedious Swedish flicks, and then the first and most iconic instalment, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, got adapted into a delicious English-language feature by David Fincher, starring Rooney Mara as Lisbeth. It was excellent, and not simply because it ingeniously used the music of Enya to soundtrack a torture sequence.

Well, Fincher and Mara are gone, replaced by director Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe) and star Claire Foy. That old version of Lisbeth is out as well. Sure, she’s still moonlighting as a score-settler for women. But now, she’s also a superhero working to keep an actual nuclear apocalypse from going down. So, she’s Batman. Or Bond. And that’s fun. However, Lisbeth should be taking missions that are weirder, darker, more intimate than those dudes. This time, she’s pretty much picking up Jack Ryan's scraps.

If you’ve seen the previous entries, you can treat Spider’s Web like a sequel. If you haven’t seen any, you can go in blind and follow along well enough. (And if you were recently unfrozen from the early 1200s, you might be baffled by the modern language and haircuts if not outright driven insane by the supernatural act of moving imagery, but narratively, you’d keep up.)

After opening on Lisbeth as a little girl—running away from her abusive father and condemning her sister, Camilla, to his 'care'—we see adult Lisbeth, complete with superheroic facepaint, teaching a very bad man a painful, expensive and testicularly-focused lesson he won’t forget. Unfortunately, that’s it for the S&M vigilantism. Spider’s Web quickly transitions into standard spy mode, with Salander recruited by a concerned computer developer (Stephen Merchant) to steal a program from America’s NSA that would allow them to remotely detonate missiles all over the world. She succeeds, obviously, and is then robbed by a European gang known as The Spiders, who blow up her apartment too. She asks reliably grizzled journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) to help stop them setting anything off, while NSA special agent Neeham (Lakeith Stanfield) flies in to snag the hacker who bested him, only to get repeatedly sonned by the wily Lisbeth time and again.

Needless to say, we’re in the realm of comic books now. To demonstrate the villainy of the bad-guys, one of their victims reveals a skin-coloured face mask covering his cartoonishly ravaged face, which is neat. One fight scene has Lisbeth overcoming four male assailants by tasing them all in the testicles. Also neat. And when Lisbeth’s corrupted sister Camilla returns as an adult—played by Sylvia Hoeks—we know she’s bad because she’s wearing an undeniable villain's outfit: an all-red pantsuit and eyebrows died white-blonde, which is, unlike much else in the film, a strong, distinctive choice.

There are a few decent action set pieces, and cinematographer Pedro Luque does nifty things with the camera, seemingly jumping out a window and sliding down a roof behind Lisbeth, and wearily rocking from side-to-side as she recovers from a drugging mid-chase. Foy absolutely has the chops (and the cropped hair) for the part, which is more emotionally fraught and complex than Batman, Bond or Jason Bourne. But the script—by Steven Knight and Álvarez & Jay Basu—sadly pushes those traumas down, losing them in the din of the generic 'save the world' storyline. Foy, thankfully, finds other, subtler ways to unearth them, while remaining appropriately spiky.

So, there’s some fire left in a Girl-centered franchise starring Foy. And The Girl in the Spider’s Web is certainly more satisfying than the most recent Batman, Bond and Bourne pictures. It’s just unfortunate that the most unique element of this particular saga—Lisbeth as an unforgiving and specifically feminist avenger, taking on misogynistic men, in wild ways—has been largely scrubbed away. This is like any other espionage thriller. The most depraved act here is when a journalist deletes an entire article by holding the backspace key, from bottom to top. Men are truly the worst.

3/5

Rated MA15+ for strong themes and violence.