Noomi Rapace
Underused in Bright, killed post-Prometheus. When will the girl with the dragon tats be the woman with the role worthy of her?
When Noomi Rapace takes a role, she doesn’t do things by halves. Shame she barely had half a role as Leilah in Bright, the Netflix fantasy where she notched up about five per cent of the screen-time spent on bullets and burritos. Not since Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith has a great actor been so squandered in elf drag.
Lately, that imbalance between Rapace’s investment and either a) her screen-time or b) the quality of films has become pronounced. The situation frustrates doubly given how fiercely she tattooed herself on our eyeballs as the Millennium Trilogy’s Lisbeth Salander. Revealing humanising depths and fearless transformative instincts, Rapace burrowed under Lisbeth’s skin and pierced her own skin for the role.
“I go all-in,” she said, and it shows, but that ferocity has been wasted. In maternal mystery Babycall, muddled plotting fogged Rapace’s focused angst. A trend for her English-language films emerged in Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, in which Guy Ritchie failed to channel her intensity, instead letting the Holmes/Watson bromance barge her to the fringes. In Prometheus, Rapace spliced physical commitment with engaging vulnerability as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. But that surgical set-piece proved more memorable than Shaw as written, who didn’t even get to die on-screen before Alien: Covenant.
Rapace brought a tormented magnetism to Nadia in crime drama The Drop, though Tom Hardy and Matthias Schoenaerts dominated. Elsewhere, she’s played scarred, scrappy characters in support roles and lead vehicles, few of which deserved her. She suffered umpteen indignities, including hokey plotting, in torture thriller Rupture. Fronting action vehicle Unlocked, she wrestled with leaden plotting. Dystopian Netflix dud What Happened To Monday was tougher still, demanding Rapace play septuplets and go hard in the scraps: but director Tommy Wirkola couldn’t pummel much coherence or clarity from a derivative, murky plot.
Which leads to Bright, where she’s again sidelined, leaving you wishing Rapace could get a shot at more self-determining roles. To that end, she’s giving producing a go. Perhaps she’ll score in female-driven bodyguard thriller Close; Vicky Jewson directs. Let’s hope, meanwhile, the lead in Niki Caro’s opera-singer biopic Callas sees Rapace hitting the high notes. KH