This second English-language adaptation of a novel from the series begun by the late Stieg Larsson feels secondhand in every way. The director is new, the lead actress is new, the rest of the cast is new, and the book on which the film is based wasn't written by Larsson. (It's the work of estate-approved Swedish author David Lagercrantz, and like Larsson's books it was a transatlantic bestseller.)
Everything about this project is awkward. Two years after the original Swedish film versions of Larsson's first three novels (which made Noomi Rapace an international star), David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of the first book, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," starring Rooney Mara as the troubled butt-kicker Lisbeth Salander, was a worldwide hit. But plans to quickly follow it with sequels based on Larsson's second and third books (written before the author died in 2004) fizzled out. So Sony decided to go totally clean-slate and reboot the series with a movie version of the non-Larsson fourth novel, "The Girl in the Spider's Web," presenting it as — what the hey — a direct sequel to the Fincher film, just seven years later.
New director Fede Alvarez is more of an international man of action than one might have expected from his previous features, the blind-man-in-a-dark-house suspense flick "Don't Breathe" and the 2013 "Evil Dead" remake. However, his facility is largely in the area of commonplace car crashes and explosions (he has mastered the art of rolling a big ball of fire down a corridor). Equally familiar is the annoyingly insistent score by Roque Banos, which in no way recalls the lustrous work of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the Fincher film.
The movie's central problem is its star, Claire Foy ("The Crown," "First Man"). Unlike Rooney Mara, who played Lizbeth Salander as an avenging goth — an icy, enraged survivor of sexual abuse — Foy's take on the character suggests not rage, but shell shock. Even in the movie's best scene — the opening confrontation between Salander and a man she knows to be a serial assaulter of women — Foy is remote and mumbly (and possibly too restrained in deploying Salander's trademark taser). To be fair, the actress is just following her director's lead, no doubt assuming he'll make everything work in the edit. But Alvarez hasn't quite done that. And the script that he co-wrote with Jay Basu and Steven Knight diminishes the rest of Larsson's characters as well, especially Salander's ally, the ace investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist, played in the Fincher movie, with full stubbly sex appeal, by Daniel Craig, but played here, in a cloud of vanilla irrelevance, by Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason.
We expect the stories in movies like this to be infernally complicated, and this one doesn't disappoint. After some introductory shots of Salander's neck tattoo and face piercings, and an eyeblink's worth of lesbian bedroom dalliance (with no sex), we get right down to business. Salander is contacted by a Swedish computer scientist named Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) who has created a computer program called Firefall, which can do all kinds of blah-blah-blah bad things, mainly of a nuclear sort. Balder is ashamed to admit that he has given this program to the war-pig Americans, and that it now resides in the deepest computer lair of the National Security Agency. He wants the legendary hacker Salander to break into the NSA network and extract the Firefall program and, um...
The extraction is no problem, of course. But as soon as Salander intrudes into the NSA's Washington-based domain, an alarm goes off (who would've expected that?) and a security honcho named Needham (Lakeith Stanfield) quickly traces the intruder to Stockholm. In fact, right to the big dark half-wrecked industrial space that Salander calls home. (Everybody in this movie seems to live in some sort of grim, gray warehouse. It's like a lifestyle disease.) Needham lights out for Sweden, and before you know it, he's parked outside the headquarters of the Swedish Security Service, in a rental car whose trunk is filled with heavy weaponry. (This could surely happen in some alternate, off-planet Sweden of which we're so far unaware.)
Meanwhile, Salander has attracted the malign attention of a Russian crime syndicate called the Spiders (cue spidery tattoos — including one slyly situated on a guy's forehead). The Spiders naturally want Balder's program for their own unpleasant purposes. Salander has an unhappy history with this outfit — which is now being led by her fashionable but psychopathic sister, Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks, of "Blade Runner 2049"). I liked Camilla; she's twisted and freaky and her superpower is running through snowy woods in high heels. We'll guaranteed be seeing her in the next of these movies, should there be one. I also liked the Russki hood who has had his nose whacked off ("This is what you get when you try to f—- with the Spiders," he says, philosophically), but he's probably down for the count.
Foy's Salander moves through all of this hubbub like a woman who's been swatted in the head with an old-time New York City phone book. For a while she's accompanied by Frans Balder's suddenly orphaned son, August (Christopher Convery), who turns out to have a key role to play in all of this. From time to time, director Alvarez will dispatch her on one or another mission improbable — like the face-off on a bridge in which one of the hoods is blasting away at Salander with his machine gun and she nevertheless decides to run over to a nearby ladder and climb way up it to access some sort of control lever that lifts the bridge and allows her to escape. She knows all kinds of stuff like that!
Bottom line: This is an action movie that's short on charisma and invention, but is nevertheless competently made and not without a certain style. It might be embraced by genre fans of an only moderately demanding sort. But it's too bad that Salander is no longer explicitly an avenger of abused women — was that not what made her unique? And it's unfortunate that the scowling Rooney Mara of the death-ray eyes is no longer playing her, and that Daniel Craig (or the original Blomkvist in the Swedish films, Michael Nyqvist) is no longer on hand to add a little warmth to Salander's bleak tale. These things are missed. But they won't be coming back.
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