The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018) * *

Directed by:  Fede Alvarez

Starring:  Claire Foy, Sylvia Hoeks, Lakeith Stanfield, Stephen Merchant, Sverrir Gudnason, Vicky Krieps, Claes Bang

Reflecting on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), it was a dark mystery with emotionally wounded and goth Lisbeth Salander at its center.    The film was as gloomy as its wintry Swedish landscape, and it worked on that level.    I would never have pegged Lisbeth, the titular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to evolve into a James Bond-like action hero.    But, she has, and in The Girl in the Spider's Web, we see how limiting that can be.    Lisbeth Salander is a character more befitting in isolation than in the middle of an international espionage tale, but here she is in hand-to-hand combat and car chases with the bad guys. 

Claire Foy (First Man, Unsane, The Crown) assumes the Lisbeth Salander role from Rooney Mara, who was Oscar-nominated for the 2011 film.    Foy is immensely talented, and could have easily essayed the role for its strengths if the screenwriters weren't so determined to make her an action star.  What made Mara's Lisbeth so fascinating is all but stripped away in this follow-up.    Foy broods for a few moments and callously kicks female lovers out of her bed so she can immerse herself in her work as a computer hacker, but those simply remind us of what we don't have anymore:  a mysterious, pained, flawed protagonist.   We now have a vigilante who acts as an avenging angel for women terrorized by men.   This would be an interesting direction to go into also, but soon the plot takes over.   Foy has the dragon tattoo on her back, but that's where the similarities end.

We gain some background on Lisbeth's childhood trauma as she escapes from her abusive father, leaving her beloved sister, who was reluctant to leave, to suffer further abuse.   Lisbeth slides down a snowy mountainside to freedom, but she is always haunted by guilt at leaving her sister behind.   But, there is no time to dwell on these matters, as a penitent computer engineer (Merchant), who created a program called Firefall which could control the world's nuclear silos, hires Lisbeth to steal Firefall from the NSA so it can be safe from any government's hands.    Shortly after successfully hacking into the NSA and stealing the program, Lisbeth's apartment is blown up by creepy thugs and an NSA agent (Stanfield) is on her trail. 

Lisbeth is now on the run, and after a series of unfortunate events, finds herself protecting the brilliant son of the engineer while evading a shadowy group called The Spiders led by, you guessed it, Lisbeth's estranged sister Camilla (Hoeks).   Camilla dresses and behaves like a dominatrix, while making mistakes uber-villains so often make.   Such as:  Instead of simply killing the hero, she plays games with him/her and allows them time to escape and thwart the villain's plans.    The villain's success rate improves dramatically if the hero is taken out of the equation.   Take it from me, I'm correct, because I've obviously seen more spy movies than the villains have.

The Girl in the Spider's Web reduces the characters and the events to typical action movie fare.  Little attempt is made to distinguish Lisbeth from countless other heroes.   She can adapt herself to any situation, and even knows how to repel the effects of a paralyzing poison by crushing up amphetamines with her one free hand.    Thank goodness the amphetamines were nearby, as was something to crush them, and that she still had the strength to do all of that while the poison was seizing her body.   I'm sure she learned all of this in the Swedish special forces training we never knew she had.