All-action Claire’s no phoney
CROWN STAR FOY KICKS ASS IN
BARBARA Broccoli has made it clear she won’t be doing a Doctor Who with her Bond franchise.
But if you’re still wondering what a female 007 might look like, check out what Hollywood has done to Stieg Larsson’s Girl With A Dragon Tattoo.
Here his tortured Swedish goth hacker has been turned into an ass-kicking action heroine who drives fast cars, delivers faster punches and gets out of scrapes with a very useful gadget.
We meet Claire Foy’s Lisbeth Salander standing in front of winged statue in the living room of a wifebeating billionaire.
When the thug stops dead in his tracks (Lisbeth knows the exact spot) our avenging angel topples the statue and traps his legs in a noose.
And as he is hoisted to the ceiling she pulls out her smartphone and transfers his ill-gotten gains into the bank account of his battered wife.
This super-phone doesn’t just let Lisbeth exact revenge on abusive men.
In this entertaining but wildly improbable action movie it also allows her to open prison doors, take over CCTV cameras and hijack speeding motors.
I’m not sure what model it is but I’d love to visit its App Store.
Larsson died in 2004 before his Millennium trilogy became a global hit. Unlike Foy’s Lisbeth I don’t have psychic powers…but I suspect the Swede might now be slowly rotating in his icy grave.
Still, if you found David Fincher and Rooney Mara’s more faithful 2011 Girl With A Dragon Tattoo adaption too gloomy you should have a fine time with this cheesier and more action-packed version.
The movie, based on the first of two follow-ups by the writer David Lagercrantz, keeps some of the “Nordic noir” style that inspired Fincher.
There are plenty of moody shots of people staring at fjords, dark secrets are uncovered and Foy has even fewer reasons to smile than she did when she played The Queen in The Crown.
And as IcelandicSwedish actor Sverrir Gudnason from Borg McEnroe has replaced Daniel Craig as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, he sounds a lot more authentic.
But Foy has a lot less to work with than her predecessors. For Mara and Noomi Rapace (who starred in the Swedish versions of the trilogy), Lisbeth was a damaged young woman who was seeking retribution while coping with psychological trauma.
Foy looks and sounds the part (she delivers her lines with a subtle Scandi lilt) but her main jobs are to chase around Stockholm fighting baddies and uncovering conspiracies. Soon after stringing up the billionaire her phone lights up.
It’s an old-fashioned call from a worried chap called Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant making no attempt to hide his Bristol accent), a recently fired employee of the National Security Agency.
His computer program FireFall can access launch codes for every nuclear weapon on the planet and he’s terrified because it’s in the hands of the US government and (presumably after reading Trump’s latest twitter rant) has decided it needs to be destroyed.
When Lisbeth agrees to steal it for him (as this is a big job she needs to use her laptop) she finds herself in a tangled web involving a blond hitman (Claes Bang), a shadowy Swedish spy (Synnøve Macody Lund), a US hacker-turned agent (Lakeith Stanfield) and her evil estranged sister (Sylvia Hoeks, left).
This time her journalist partner Blomkvist feels a little redundant but director Fede Alvarez delivers slick action scenes and Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight keeps us guessing with some very clever twists.