'The Girl In The Spider's Web' A Review

The Girl In the Spider's Web is an action/thriller, a continuation/soft reboot of the Dragon Tattoo series. This installment finds the titular Girl aka Lisbeth Salender(Claire Foy) as the freelance hacker now turned freelance hacker/avenger. We open on Lisbeth mitigating some sweet justice on a corupt abusive CEO. She's then tasked with retrieving an NSA program that can access the entire world's nuclear arsenal. Her (successful) hack alerts NSA special agent Edwin Needham(LaKeith Stanfield ) who immediately departs to retrieve the program but she's also alerted an unknown crime syndicate. A high stakes game of cat-and-mouse ensues.

Certainly a more inspired casting choice than Rooney Mara, Foy does well as the beloved title character. She's not as dynamic as the originator of the role Noomi Rapace in the Swedish trilogy but she has the confidence, physical competence, and electricity that the role requires she just isn't given the material with which to soar. The issue isn't with her performance necessarily it is with the script which distills an emotionally complicated thriller into a thin James Bond wanna-be. Foy is an inspired choice, as is LaKeith Stanfield and Stephen Merchant(as the creator of the McGuffin) but the script doesn't allow these exceptional casting choices to do much beyond the rote mainstream.

The film begins with a very stylish scene, Lisbeth in white face paint literally stringing up a guilty man in his luxurious an austere high rise apartment. It's a striking compelling sequence, setting Lisbeth up as some kind of feminist Batman. But after that scene both the style and the substance dissipate quickly into predictable and relatively bland genre fair.

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