Claire Foy is really good as Lisbeth Salander in this sequel/reboot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the plot itself doesn’t hold a candle to the original trilogy, and the rest of the cast fail to make any impression.

Premise: Crusading hacker Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is hired by computer programmer Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) to steal a top secret programme which he designed for the NSA, so that Balder can destroy it to prevent it from ever being used by any country. But when the programme falls into the wrong hands, Salander must go to extreme lengths to recover it.

Review:

This is an odd film for me as it comes with a lot of baggage and expectations both from the original books, and from the two cinematic versions of Lisbeth Salander that have already appeared over the last decade. I was a big fan of Stieg Larsson’s original “Millennium” trilogy (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, “The Girl Who Played With Fire”, and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”), and although I think it’s difficult for any film adaptation to truly live up to the expectations of a beloved book series, I though the Swedish 2009 film trilogy starring Noomi Rapace and the late Michael Nyqvist was a really good adaption (trimming just enough material to maintain the pace and flow, without losing too much of the novels’ texture).

David Fincher seemed like a perfect director to make the 2011 English language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and he assembled an all-star cast including the likes of Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright. Whilst I did think it had a few pacing issues (partly because it attempted to be as faithful as possible to the novel), Fincher’s directorial tone suited the material perfectly, and the amazing cast were always captivating on screen.

“…Claire Foy makes the character her own after Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara…”

But the somewhat uncompromising nature of the 2011 film (which, let’s not forget, had some scenes of brutality and violence that were very difficult to watch) meant that it failed to find the audience that had been hoped for, and ultimately was a commercial loss. Disappointingly, that meant that we would never get to see the Fincher/Craig/Mara version of the second or third parts of the trilogy.

So instead, the studio decided to try this “soft reboot”, skipping the second and third of Stieg Larsson’s novels, and instead adapting the fourth novel in the series. Now it’s important to bear in mind that Stieg Larsson died after writing the original trilogy, and so this “fourth” book was actually written by David Lagercrantz with the permission of Larsson’s estate. I haven’t read the fourth book, as I wasn’t sure it would be in keeping with Larsson’s original vision for the characters, but from what I’ve heard, the fourth novel is at least more faithful to Larsson’s trilogy that this film adaptation is.

For one, the character of Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist who is the co-lead of the original trilogy, is largely written out of this film. Played here by Sverrir Gudnason (who is arguably too young, and who certainly lacks the screen presence of either Daniel Craig or Michael Nyqvist), Blomkvist is reduced to a minor supporting character in the film version of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. He plays no active role in the central mystery until he’s called in by Salander to assist with some research, so the notion that the character is a crusading journalist uncovering corruption in Sweden is completely lost. In fact, Mikael Blomkvist gets so little to do, he’s barely even a “sidekick” in this film, and certainly not a co-lead.

“…feels like a rejected sub-par Jason Bourne script…”

Equally, while Claire Foy is great as Lisbeth Salander (and she achieves the almost impossible task of making the character her own after Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara), the way the character of Salander is written feels like she’s lost a lot of her edge and complexity. At the start, she’s portrayed as almost a vigilante, and appears to be publicly known as such, which doesn’t fit well with the secretive and private character established in the previous films/books. Earlier supporting characters like Holger Palmgren and Dragan Armansky are now completely forgotten, and it feels like Salander is simply portrayed as a one-woman (cyber) army, now not even working with Mikael Blomkvist in any meaningful way.

And perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad, if the story itself felt worthy of Stieg Larsson and his creations – but it does not. I can’t comment on whether the book is better, but the film version of The Girl in the Spider’s Web just feels like a rejected sub-par Jason Bourne script. Unforgivably, the script makes the lazy decision to effectively make Salander’s actions the catalyst for all the bad things that happen, so that, quite literally, if she hadn’t interfered in the first place, everything would have largely worked out okay (or at the very least, could have been resolved with far less innocent bloodshed).

The lazy writing is compounded by the odd decision to re-con Lisbeth Salander’s family history by giving her a previously unmentioned sister. Given how central Salander’s family history was to the original trilogy, to now go back and meddle with it is problematic at best – but when the ultimate payoff for that meddling is so utterly underwhelming, you have to question why they did it in the first place.

“…feels like a pale imitation of the earlier Salander and Blomkvist films…”

All in all, the one shining light in all this mess is Claire Foy’s performance, which is genuinely engaging and enthralling throughout. And, I should mention, Stephen Merchant also does well with another non-comedy dramatic role (following on from Logan), even if he doesn’t have a huge amount to do. But the decisions to reduce Blomkvist to an afterthought, to lose a lot of the complexity of Salander’s character, to meddle with Lisbeth’s family history (for no good reason), and to put all of the characters in an overly-familiar and generic thriller storyline, mean that The Girl in the Spider’s Web feels like a pale imitation of the earlier Salander and Blomkvist films.