Elizabeth, meet Lisbeth

Crown star Claire Foy takes hacker heroine character out for another spin

IF you thought the Queen made quite the entrance by parachuting in to the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, wait till you see what she gets up to in Fede Alvarez’s thriller. Riding motorcycles, throwing punches, generally kicking posteriors from dawn till dusk in her superhero-like pursuit of justice in a bad old world.

She does no such things, of course. The confusion is understandable to some extent, though. Despite the radical makeover into Lisbeth Salander, hacker heroine, it is hard to look at Claire Foy and not think of her as Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series The Crown.

This is not the most remarkable thing about Alvarez’s serviceable adaptation of David Lagercrantz’s novel, which in turn follows on from the late Stieg Larsson’s much-loved trilogy. Worthier still of a raised eyebrow is why Salander is back in her third incarnation after four feature films and a television mini-series. Love her as millions do, is the character so deserving of attention that one would watch essentially the same tale over and over?

Alvarez opens his story in mean and moody style inside an apartment in Sweden where a man is holding forth to a woman about how he has been under pressure lately, didn’t mean it, etc. Just another grubby wifebeater, this one rich enough to stuff his home with art. Into this situation steps Lisbeth to put the scumbag straight.

Next in her in-tray is a meeting with computer programmer Frans Balder, played by Stephen Merchant with more than a hint of his own West Country accent. Balder reckons he has done a dangerous thing in inventing a tool that can breach and control a country’s defence systems. It is now in the hands of the US and Balder wants it back. Can Lisbeth hack the apparently unhackable? What do you think?

When the best laid plan hits a roadblock and Lisbeth finds herself the hunted as well as the hunter, she turns to her old journalist mucker Mikael Blomkvist (played here by Sverrir Gudnason). Mikael has sold Millennium, the magazine that made