It may not be from David Fincher, but the newest installment in the budding Millennium film franchise is a welcome addition to, well, whatever it is becoming. Our favorite girl with a certain fire-breathing lizard on her back returns for action and hacking and sex and, well, the usual Lisbeth Salander stuff. And while it can hardly stand up to Fincher's film or the original trilogy, there are some high points to this spidery new story.
Or at least, high points to the film. The story itself was, for me, a mess of mostly inconsequential scenes with vague plot points that I can only assume made sense to the creators. Lisbeth is hired to retrieve Firefall, a program apparently linked to global nuclear codes, and return it to its designer, who may or may not destroy it. In doing so, she falls deep into a network of spies, thugs, and assassins who want various things and operate mostly to kill people. Which is fine and fun and makes absorbing cinema. It's also been done before -- to death -- and by more entertaining franchises. Nothing here is terribly interesting beyond what we've seen from Mission: Impossible or James Bond or, or, or.
Nothing plot-wise, that it. Claire Foy takes over the role of Lisbeth in this sequel or soft reboot or whatever this movie is. Though not as convincing as a vigilante hacker as Rooney Mara was, Foy climbs the ranks of great action spy/thriller women. She delivers a muscular performance, finding emotional resonance and physicality that, while arguably not accurate to the character as written in novels -- I don't know, I've never read the series -- nevertheless cuts a formidable swath on screen. And it's a plus that Foy didn't merely attempt to recreate Noomi Rapace or Mara on screen.
Director Fede Alvarez, though still clearly working to make this film stand up with his others, gives over often to a sordid sort of mainstream consciousness, delivering needless action and mind-numbingly overt metaphors instead of providing his usual unique flavor. Then again, though, he crafts a damn sexy movie filled with eye-popping visuals. It's got a gorgeous color palette, a chilled atmosphere, and the most nihilistic aesthetic we've seen all year. While the story is about as spidery and webby as any twisted spy thriller -- which means the details fly over my head -- you could get a lot worse than The Girl in the Spider's Web.
IMDb: The Girl in the Spider's Web
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