The Girl in the Spider's Web

The return of Lizbeth Salander, peak hacker and cyber-warrior, sees her, unfortunately, dropped into a somewhat more generic narrative than the previous stories – in this case, being tasked with helping a programmer recover his nuclear missile control technology to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. When, inevitably, it still ends up in the wrong hands, Salander’s sent on a chase that will see her tangling with multiple security agencies and a mysterious group known as the Spiders – and finally being dragged back into the past she thought she’d escaped.

Based on the fourth novel of the series (and the first not to be written by Stieg Larrson, whose death after the third novel resulted in some complex legal shenanigans with his surviving partner, meaning that not even incomplete notes of Larsson’s work made it into this one), this sticks our unconventional modern heroine into a pretty regulation action movie that just happens to be largely set in Sweden. Claire Foy has all the externals that should go into making a good Lizbeth Salander (the cool exterior, detached yet devastatingly direct in achieving her aims) – but the story around her never really gives her much of a chance to stick out particularly. There’s some odd casting in there (Stephen Merchant in particular sticks out in a conventional role as the guy who wrote the program that’s the McGuffin of the story – there’s no particular reason why he’s doing this role other than because it got offered to him), and a couple of decent action/heist moments, but the ending, in particular, is annoyingly pat and doesn’t really give us reason to stick around. Given the English language adaptations have skipped two books, there’s also a couple of character details that seem newly grabbed from the missing two books that are just sorta slapped on screen without any of the narrative support that would have meant they meant anything in particular. Salander’s periodic sidekick from the books, Mikail Blomqvist (yes, Salander was his sidekick in the first book but given her name’s on the title of all of them, he’s slipped back into sidekick territory), is back but he feels pretty marginal and could easily have been removed without anybody particularly noticing. This feels like a reduction of what was a smart thriller series into just another airport novel runaround (much as the recent Jason Bourne felt like it was going through the motions without any real reason to exist), and while it’s never particularly unwatchable, it doesn’t inspire a lot of reasons to go particularly looking for it either.