CAUGHT IN THE ACT
‘The Girl in the Spider’s Web’ fails as a thriller, so think of it as an adult fairy tale. Plus the week’s other releases
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
Dir: Fede Alvarez. Starring: Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith Stanfield, Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant, Claes Bang, Vicky Krieps. Cert 15, 115 mins
The Girl in the Spider’s Web seems a long way removed from the original vision of the Millennium series author, Stieg Larsson. His crime novels were rooted in the Swedish contemporary experience. They drew heavily on his observations of corruption, political extremism and sexual violence. The new feature (using Larsson’s characters but based on a novel by David Lagercrantz and intended as a loose sequel to David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is stylised in the extreme. Its action scenes are ingenious but very cartoonish. It has a dream-like feel. We keep expecting that Lisbeth Salander (now played by Claire
Foy) will wake up and the film will take a more grounded and grown-up approach but this never happens. Instead, we are presented with an adult fairy tale.
An early flashback of Lisbeth as a child, playing chess with her sister Camilla in some dark, cavernous room, reveals how little Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez is interested in conventional realism. As one sister makes a move, we see a spider on the board. The girls are captives of their very sinister father but that still doesn’t explain why no one has a feather duster. (Surely, someone would have cleaned away the cobwebs.)
As she showed in her portrayal of Neil Armstrong’s wife in First Man, Foy can be very expressive on screen even when starved of speaking lines. Lisbeth Salander, a motorbike driving, bisexual punk with a genius for gadgets and a reckless bravery, is nothing like Janet Armstrong but she too is on the taciturn side. Foy plays her with the same steely intensity. The scenes here in which Lisbeth is held captive against her will or force fed debilitating drugs are reminiscent of what Foy’s character endured when locked up in an asylum in Steven Soderbergh’s recent low-budget, iPhone-shot Unsane. Here, though, her resilient, committed performance is undermined by the flimsiness of the plotting.
The basic storyline here could have come from any humdrum Cold War thriller of the past 50 years. A brilliant scientist (played a little improbably by comedian Stephen Merchant) has developed a computer programme called Project Firewall that can control the codes for all the world’s nuclear weapons. He regrets designing it but hopes Lisbeth can stop it from falling into the wrong hands. This part of the plot somehow becomes intertwined with the ongoing psychodrama about Lisbeth’s troubled family background – the father who abused her, the sister from whom she is estranged and the roots of her misandry.
Director Alvarez may be touching on some dark areas but the film is very sleek and stylish. It panders to the ongoing preconception that everyone in Sweden has an intense interest in interior design. Lisbeth lives in a warehouse-style apartment that is both as secure as Fort Knox and immaculately maintained in best Bauhaus minimalist fashion. Even the misogynistic villains (the bankers Lisbeth likes to truss up) have good taste. The film is set in winter. Colours are desaturated. Everything is seen through grey filters. Snow is always on the ground. This makes the crimson red costumes worn by Lisbeth’s twin sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks in wicked witch mode) in the latter scenes seem all the more striking. There are strangely fetishistic scenes of characters in rubber and masks.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web has a bumpy, episodic feel. Its action sequences are often exhilarating in themselves but have little to do with the bigger story the film is trying to tell. We’ll see Lisbeth riding across the ice on her motorbike one moment or performing stunts in a car that Steve McQueen might have envied the next. She never loses her presence of mind. If fire is raging round her, she’ll find water to protect her or a window to jump out of. In between bouts of vicious violence, Alvarez will often then show her curled up on a window ledge or looking soulful and vulnerable, like a little girl lost.
One of the film’s major problems is that it can’t work out anything meaningful to do with Mikael Blomkvist (played here Sverrir Gudnason), the crusading journalist who is as important to the original Millennium stories as Lisbeth himself. He has a bit of writer’s block. His girlfriend is suspicious of his obsession with Lisbeth but all he does throughout the film is slavishly follow in Lisbeth’s wake, invariably turning up at the crime scenes just after she has left and always seeming like a hanger-on.
Some of the supporting characters are equally one-dimensional. and redundant. The incongruously cheerful American NSA security expert and ex-hacker Needham/“War Child” (Lakeith Stanfield) seems to have stumbled out of some spy comedy. Claes Bang, the charismatic lead in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner, The Square, is reduced here to playing a heavy whose blond hair makes him look like Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love.
Alongside its many digressions and random plot twists, the film offers spectacular and enjoyably ghoulish
interludes: explosions, characters who peel off their faces, chases, fights, crashes and standoffs in the snow. As a thriller, it barely works at all but as a fairground ride-style fantasy melodrama, it still has its moments. Geoffrey Macnab
A rip-roaring, superhero-era Hood Robin Hood
Dir: Otto Bathurst; Starring: Taron Egerton, Ben Mendelsohn, Jamie Dornan, Paul Anderson, Jamie Foxx, Eve Hewson. Cert 12A, 116 mins
There isn’t any obvious pressing need for yet another film about Robin Hood. From Errol Flynn in Hollywood’s golden age to Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe more recently, not to mention Richard Greene and Jason Connery on TV, Disney animated versions and Mel Brooks satires about men in tights, audiences have been very well served with tales from Sherwood Forest. However, this rip-roaring version, directed by Otto Bathurst (best known for his work on TV’s Peaky Blinders) is a Robin Hood for the superhero era. As reimagined here, Robin of Loxley seems partly like a medieval version of Bruce Wayne with a bow and arrow – and partly like a delinquent teen gang member in a hoodie.
The new film (produced by Leonardo DiCaprio) tells only a fraction of the full story. It is clearly intended as the first in a franchise. After a clumsy beginning, the story quickly builds up momentum. It has a likeably self-deprecating performance from Taron Egerton (pictured above) as Robin and a wonderfully sneering and malevolent one from Ben Mendelsohn as the Sheriff of Nottingham.
At first, Robin is just another “lord of the manor”, a carefree and spoilt jack-the lad, looking for romance and adventure. In most other versions, he takes a small eternity to meet and court Maid Marian. Here, he encounters her right at the start, when she tries to steal one of his horses. The moment he sees her face, he is instantly besotted. Marian (played by Eve Hewson, rock star Bono’s daughter) is earthier and more political and class conscious than the demure figure seen in the other movies. She and Robin enjoy an idyllic love affair – but then he is conscripted to go off and fight against the infidels. The years pass.
In his depiction of the crusades, director Bathurst deliberately reminds us of the misadventures of western armies in contemporary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The crusaders can’t cope with the guerilla-style tactics of the locals. The fight scenes are brutal. There are atrocities on both sides but the English are especially ruthless, torturing and killing prisoners. Robin is disgusted by his own side’s behaviour and not sure what cause he is fighting for. When he first encounters the ferocious Muslim noble Yahya/Little John (Jamie Foxx), the two nearly hack each to pieces. Of course, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Back in England, all is going to ruin. With Robin missing, presumed dead, the Sheriff has seized his
property. A war tax bill allows him to fleece all the citizens while he lives in luxury. Mendelsohn dresses like a 14th century version of Joseph Goebbels. His long coat alone is enough to tell us he is not to be trusted. He has a vulpine quality. He delivers his lines with mellow sarcasm, viciousness and self-pity. (He was abused as a kid and has a longstanding grudge against the world.) He is just the villain that any selfrespecting new Robin Hood movie needs. “You bastards, I am the Sheriff of Nottingham!” he yells with demented fury at one stage.
Aspects of the film are confusing. The love triangle between Robin, Marian and Will Scarlet (played by Jamie Dornan, fresh from Fifty Shades) stretches credibility. One moment she is telling Robin she will wait for him; the next she is happily together with Will. He is a fiery Red Clydeside union-leader type, always speaking up on behalf of the oppressed Nottingham tax payers. Some of lines in Ben Chandler and David James Kelly’s screenplay are strangely anachronistic. Robin is encouraged to “follow the money”, as if he is Woodward and Bernstein in pursuit of Richard Nixon.
Robin’s transformation from battle-scarred and traumatised veteran of the crusades into action hero takes place very quickly. Jamie Foxx gives him a few tutorials on how to “fight up close” using “street weapons” and, in no time at all, he is leaping from ramparts like a cross between Batman and a martial arts warrior from a Zhang Yimou film. His hood becomes his symbol. At the same time he is sabotaging the Sheriff’s affairs, he is busy buttering him up. He pays more money into the Sheriff’s coffers than anyone else, even if he promptly steals it back again, and he flatters the sheriff incessantly.
Egerton’s Robin is a relentlessly cheerful type who doesn’t let anything (the loss of his lands, his girlfriend taking up with another man) get him down for too long. He doesn’t bring much introspection or darkness to the role but he leaps hither and thither with unending enthusiasm. The bleakest moments here tend to involve Jamie Foxx’s character who endures bereavement and suffers torture – but he is too hardboiled ever to be cowed or to lose his knack for sardonic one-liners.
F Murray Abraham lends some gravitas as a very sinister Cardinal, even more powerful and ruthless than the Sheriff. The light relief comes from Tim Minchin as a strangely under-nourished seeming but always droll Friar Tuck.
Some of the elements from earlier Robin Hood movies are present and correct. Others are ignored or distorted. The filmmakers take a long time to cover not a great deal in plot terms. A large part of the film is devoted to en elaborate heist which plays like something from a Michael Mann movie, but with knives and axes instead of pistols and machine guns and get away horses and carts instead of cars. Robin spends hardly any time at all in Sherwood Forest. The tempo, though, never flags. This is such an energetic affair that it hardly seems to matter when its aim is less than true. Geoffrey Macnab
A modernday take on the Salem witch trials Assassination Nation
Dir: Sam Levinson; Starring: Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, Abra, Anika Noni Rose. Cert 18, 108 mins
Assassination Nation opens with a list of trigger warnings: abuse, toxic masculinity, bullying, transphobia, nationalism, the male gaze, murder. It’s easy to see this as a dig at the so-called “snowflake generation”, considered too weak to handle the chaos that engulfs a suburban American town after a computer hacker uploads the residents’ deepest, darkest secrets onto the internet.
By the film’s closing shots, however, a different perspective emerges: this is the story of young women fighting back against armed men out for retribution. A young woman’s world turns out to be a literal battlefield of triggers.
It’s a message this film, quite happily, gets across by taping a loudspeaker to your head and screaming into it. Writer and director Sam Levinson has made the choice – a not particularly inspired one – to equate Gen Z existence with complete overstimulation: it’s all about blood, booty shorts, big guns, and hazy neons.
Characters will loudly compete for your attention, pitted against each other across split-screens, while bass-heavy pop songs charge into any moment that even threatens stillness and quiet.
Assassination Nation is a kind of 2018 reboot of the Salem witch trials: it’s the same target – the sexually free woman – but different times (the film is explicitly set in Salem, if you somehow didn’t quite grasp the point). The trigger for our modernday Puritans, however, isn’t an overexposure to LSD-laced fungi (as some historians believe), but a mysterious hacker.
Peaceful suburbia is suddenly interrupted by a mass data leak that gives access to a large chunk of the townspeople’s texts, photos, and internet histories. Inevitably, secrets and infidelities rise to the surface and, because women always take the blame, it’s they who become the target of a Purge-like mob of masked attackers. That is, until the tables turn and Assassination Nation outs itself as a female-revenge film.
And, to Levinson's credit, the film is electric when it acts as a pure vessel for female angst: the suppressed rage, the claustrophobia of patriarchal norms, the constant sense of betrayal. Lily Colson (Odessa Young)'s fling with a father she babysits for (Joel McHale) neatly represents what Lily herself calls the "endless mindfuck" of power imbalances in sexual relationships. She wearily sends nude selfie after nude selfie because she instinctively knows it's her only way to leverage control.
Meanwhile, Bex (Hari Nef) is told to keep her hookup with football jock Diamond (Danny Ramirez) a secret because she’s trans. Levinson knows full well how satisfying it can be to break the dam and release the anger, with the film concluding in a dizzying display of ultraviolence.
However, with so much noise, every point the film wants to make has to be roared via lengthy speeches and declarations made straight down the lens. Any deeper meaning becomes lost. When the fires finally subside, there’s not that much to be found in the ashes. Clarisse Loughrey
Fine drama about chancers on the margins Shoplifters
Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda; starring: Kriin Kiki, Lily Franky, Sosuke Ikematsu, Sakura Ando, Moemi Katayama, Mayu Matsuoka. Cert 15, 121 mins
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters is set in contemporary Japan but has a storyline which could have been filched from Charles Dickens. The film (which won Cannes’ biggest prize the Palme d’Or earlier this summer) combines tear-jerking sentimentality with hard-hitting social comment. It has doe-eyed kids stealing from shops and supermarkets. Its main male character has a hint of Fagin about him.
Kore-eda’s affection for his protagonists is obvious. If they game the system and engage in petty crime, they do so to survive. They’re a close-knit family who depend on one another, even if the ties between aren’t what they seem. Kore-eda excels in working with kids. He again elicits extraordinarily moving and layered performances from his child actors here.
Osamu (Lily Franky) is the feckless patriarch, the construction site labourer and small-time thief who has taught young boy Shota (Kairi Jyo) how to pinch groceries without being caught. As he confesses, he just didn’t have anything else to pass on to the boy – it’s the only skill he had to share. To the authorities, he is a scrounger and criminal who exploits children and isn’t brave enough to stick around when they get in trouble. From another vantage point, though, he is the hero of the story.
He provides for the extended family. He intervenes when he sees a little girl, hungry, suffering from burn marks and seemingly abandoned, bringing her to join the extended family. The media may see this as child abduction but he and his wife reason that they’re not asking for a ransom. Besides, her mother didn’t report her missing. They’re very kind to Yuri (Miyu Sasaki) teaching her old wives’ remedies to stop her bed-wetting and accepting her as a daughter. Osamu, though, is also soon taking her out on the shoplifting expeditions.
Kore-eda is lifting the lid on the “gig” economy in Japan. What he discovers is profoundly depressing. Everybody, young and old, is on the make. The women work long hours in badly paid jobs in huge laundries or take jobs as sex workers. The men work on building sites. The elderly grandmother ekes out an existence on a pension which she shares with others. “Everybody gets a little poorer,” one character observes as two friends are forced to discuss among each other who will hold on to a job. (Cuts are being made and there is only room for one of them.) The family lives in a cramped apartment with kids sleeping in cupboards.
In spite of the brutality of the environment, the tone of the film is often surprisingly upbeat. Osamu is a resilient and humorous figure. Kore-eda shows family meals and even a trip to the beach. The adults may
be after the grandmother’s pension but she is treated far better than the old timers in other Japanese movies. Osamu is far kinder to her, for example, than the self-obsessed children are to the elderly parents in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story.
The kids don’t get much in the way of education but they’re always told, “only kids who can’t study at home go to school”. They look in increasing bewilderment at Osamu’s antics. There is a tragi-comic moment in which Shota is acting as lookout when Osamu smashes a car window to steal something. As he sees Osamu hobble away with his booty, the boy realises what an absurd and pathetic figure he is.
Shoplifters wasn’t an obvious winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or. It’s a modest, sometimes maudlin family drama about chancers on the margins. What makes it such an enrapturing experience is the tenderness, humour and detail Kore-eda brings to his material. He doesn’t resort to polemical tub-thumping about the social system which has allowed Osamu and the others to fall so far through the cracks. Nor is he judgmental about their scams. Instead, he highlights their humanity and their attempts to help each other, even when their own lives are threatening to unravel. Geoffrey Macnab