Claire Foy hacks, but script definitely lacks
“The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story” has lots of what you want, if you want something grindingly familiar. It’s full of prettily photographed brutality, most of it in the neighborhood of Claire Foy, the latest screen incarnation of the dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander. Throughout the film the largely nonverbal Foy’s either getting tased or choked or punched or shot or, worst of all, patronized, or she’s the one doing the tasing, choking, punching and shooting. Best of all she motorcycles at high speeds on ice, while hapless Stockholm policemen left on shore wonder if anything or anyone can catch that elusive leather-clad cyber-hacking vigilante.
Uruguayan-born Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the recent “Evil Dead” reboot) handles the action breathlessly and well enough. The movie’s acted with serious conviction. But I kind of hate it.
The people who call the ongoing Lisbeth Salander saga a feminist triumph are both desperate for role models, and equating feminism with female-on-male revenge. This is crude, low stuff with a supremely high-minded veneer of moral outrage; it leans on abusing the protagonist and women in general, so that Salander can turn the tables and vanquish a smidge the evil that men do.
Millions devoured the late Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy. The best-sellers led to the Swedish-language film adaptations starring Noomi Rapace. David Fincher’s bigger, bloatier 2011