It’s a trap. Don’t fall for it
THE GIRL IN THE
SPIDER’S WEB
Direction: Fede Alvarez Actors:claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith
Stanfield
Rating: he common consensus is that David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a stone-cold masterpiece, in my opinion — cost too much and made too little.
So this time, there’s a new director, a new cast and the budget has been slashed by half. All of which might have been fine if the film weren’t so… mediocre.
Gone is the vulnerability that Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara brought to the character of Lisbeth Salander, the cultural subtext that Fincher buried beneath his icy version, in which Sweden’s historically non-confrontational nature was mined for dormant emotions.
Gone also is the stark white snow that served as such a chilling backdrop in Fincher’s movie.
Director Fede Alvarez, for some reason, sets most of his film indoors — in the dingy lairs of overweight hackers, inside homes that look like IKEA catalogues, and in Salander’s own industrial
Thideout.
It doesn’t help that Claire Foy’s central performance is rather one-note; she glowers and scowls with not a shade of personality.
Foy chooses to portray Salander more like an action heroine than a wounded human being betrayed and abused by nearly everyone she meets.
Sverrir Gudnason, who was so strong in Borg vs Mcenroe, barely registers here as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, played previously by the late, great Michael Nyqvist and hale and hearty Daniel Craig — perhaps because the plot had no place for him anyway. There is place only for silent henchmen and bland car chases, threatening phone calls and soap opera-level plot twists. A production of this scale, bigger than anything he’s done before, could have been a big step up for Alvarez.
Instead, his film is so generic, it negates any goodwill Don’t Breathe won for him.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web is made neither for fans of Stieg Larsson’s novels, nor for casual moviegoers looking for a fun time. It’s a sad waste of Salander, a fascinating character open to endless interpretation.
(Review by Rohan Naahar)