THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB: A NEW DRAGON TATTOO STORY – Review

It’s reboot time once more, but this one’s not another entry in the horror genre, as the recent HALLOWEEN and SUSPIRIA, but it does have a connection, though slight. The source flick doesn’t go back 40 years, merely seven. That’s when Hollywood decided there needed to be an English-language film adaptation of a book series that was an international sensation. Steig Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was a huge hit inspiring a film version of that and its two sequels in his native Sweden. Ah, but America could certainly make it into a monster hit, and even though that foreign language trilogy played here at the “art house” cinemas, Sony Studios brought in director David Fincher (FIGHT CLUB) and screenwriter Steve Zaillian (SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER), and cast Bond himself Daniel Craig along with relative movie newcomer Rooney Mara. The results were…tepid. This was not to be the start of a franchise, so the plans for a US trilogy were scrapped. But much has happened since 2011, mainly the MeToo and Time’sUp movement making headlines with horrific stories of sexual intimidation, harassment, and abuse of women. Perhaps the time is exactly right for the story of a lone female swooping in to exact justice on the powerful men that pummel and degrade. Maybe audiences are ready for the return of Lisbeth Salander, in a different tale, now known as THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB: A NEW DRAGON TATTOO STORY.

This “new story” actually starts with a flashback. In a dark mansion, far from the cities of Sweden, ten-year-old Lisbeth Salander plays chess with her slightly older sister Camilla in their gloomy nursery. A servant breaks the silence, summoning them to their father’s master bedroom (mother is out of the picture). When Lisbeth realizes his demented intentions, she backs away toward the balcony, several stories above the snow covered grounds. She gives her sister a pleading stare, but Camilla will not join her escape. Lisbeth tumbles into the nearby woods and disappears. In the present day, she is wanted by the Stockholm police for a series of attacks on prominent men, who were usually beating and raping their wives, co-workers, and daughters. After her latest job, she speeds her motorcycle back to an empty old warehouse and awaits her next “assignment”. Meanwhile, her crime-fighting aide, reporter Mikal Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) complains to his married/editor lover Erika (Vicky Krieps) about their news magazine’s arrogant current owner. Lisbeth (Claire Foy) is not waiting very long. She must use her considerable computer hacking skills to retrieve a dangerous piece of software from the US and return it to its creator Fran Balder (Stephen Merchant). Balder’s work, dubbed Firefall, can give a single user complete access and control of all nuclear missiles and rockets hidden in silos around the world. She is so skilled that only Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield) is alerted of the program’s removal from the US security systems. Somehow word leaks out and Lisbeth’s home is set afire by masked gunmen who grab her laptop with Firefall installed. The same gunmen go after Balder and his pre-teen son August (Christopher Convery) when they are given protection by the local police. With intel from Mikael, Lisbeth learns that she was the target of the Spider Gang, a brutal band of Russian assassins. Can she keep two steps ahead of them, the police, and Needham and take back Firefall before it gets into the wrong hands. And just who is the mysterious leader of the Spiders?

The title pretty much sums up this thriller, mainly that Lisbeth played by the very talented Ms. Foy is “front and center”. Just weeks after her stunning supporting turn as Mrs. Armstrong in FIRST MAN, she proves her ability to carry a film as a dynamic action star. Her character is an avenging angel in black, in her first adult sequence literally wrapping up a bully in her web, submitting him to physical (and financial) punishment. But Foy makes this super-heroine very human. We see the fear in her eyes as she realizes that the odds against her may be overwhelming. And she pays a price for her actions in pure pain, whether stapling shut an oozing wound or careening off her cycle. Foy shows her as a haunted, lonely soul who can barely exist between “jobs”. It’s a complex, compelling performance. Unfortunately, her supporting cast are saddled with very simple, sometimes cliched characters. There’s not a strong connection between Lisbeth and Mikael, who’s played by Gudnason like a sullen co-worker, reminding me of Beck Bennett playing a befuddled Nordic tourist in an SNL sketch. Sylvia Hoeks, so good in BLADE RUNNER 2049, is pure deadpan banal evil as an enigmatic woman in red. Comic mastermind Merchant is quite compelling as the guilt-ridden scientist and divorced dad, sort of a modern internet Victor Frankenstein, trying to recapture his monster before it devours the planet. Stanfield is cool and confident, a man on a mission, who slowly begins to admire Lisbeth and her crew. And there’s some good comic relief from Cameron Britton as Lisbeth’s computer consultant/tech wiz only known as “Plague”.

So, you recall my mention of a “horror connection”? Well, that’s because the film’s director, Fede Alvarez, made a name for himself for the one-two box office punch of the 2013 EVIL DEAD reboot and the very entertaining “sleeper hit” of 2016 DON’T BREATHE. Now he’s made his debut as an expert action director, though there are several chilling scenes. Most notably, it’s the reveal of the Spider Gang’s stomach-churning retaliation against a former member who got too “chatty”. Whew, that’s the stuff of nightmares, along with a skin-tight back leather cocoon (hooked up to a device sucks in any air). Fede also co-wrote the script with Jay Basu and Steven Knight (basing it on the book by David Lagercrantz using Larsson’s characters), which has a definite Bond/Bourne feel with its software “MacGuffin” that turns deadly weapons against their makers. But unlike those “super spies” Salander, in the opening scenes, is a champion for individuals rather than countries. With her black hood and jumpsuit, accented by a white makeup mask about her eyes, she’s a near unstoppable “bat-woman” or even a “lady Punisher”, who’ll give these very very bad men “just what they got comin’ to ’em”. We do see a few of the plot twists “coming across the fjords” (another faked suicide, eh), but Foy is so terrific and the action set pieces are so nail-biting, that we can forgive and almost forget as we wonder whether she can survive. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that this will hopefully spark another (not saying franchise or even trilogy) thriller involving THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB.

4 Out of 5