Cast: Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, LaKeith Stanfield, Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant. Directed by: Fede Álvarez
There are certain directors for whom no matter how long their career, they have never returned to a world they have had a hand in creating. David Fincher is one of those directors, yes he directed the third Alien film, but he did a one-off never to return, with no sequels to his films. Despite Fight Club 2 being written, despite plans for a Se7en sequel called Ei8ht, despite all of this, he has never returned, but when he tackled book one of Stieg Larson’s seminal crime thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that he would return to tackle The Girl who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest was a sure thing.
Not so. After leaving to make Gone Girl, House of Cards and most episodes of Mindhunter, the powers that be concluded there was no use in bringing the gang back for a back-to-back shoot of the second and third parts in the Millennium series instead opting to go for not Larson-written The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Following on from those stories, though feeling rather stand-alone, this film follows Lisbeth Salander as she finds herself in a plot that involves nuclear weapons, abusive fathers and a clandestine society of baddies.
Losing Fincher and therefore his entire crew is a problem. His take of the first story was better than the original three Millennium Swedish versions. For one most characters resembled their book descriptions better, but there was also an intense attention to detail that Fincher brought to the story, a forensic style to murder mystery that belied the long running time and grim tone.
This time around, we have director Fede Alvarez swapping horror for a more noir thriller style. Having rebooted Evil Dead to gory effect, and making the critically acclaimed home invasion thriller Don’t Breathe, this film follows in his style of grim, nasty and well put together. But Alvarez is a horror maker, and right from the start certain sequences in this film are less tense and more nasty.
Perhaps because the plotting of the novel and therefore the film is so scattershot it feels less like a new look into the world and more an attempt by Alvarez and co to make a comic book movie without actually doing so. Unlike Noomi Rapace who’s Lisbeth Salander was an open wound, weeping with resentment, and stuck in a septic look of hate, and Rooney Mara’s oscar-nominated vaguely autistic outcast, Claire Foy plays her more like Batman. She quite literally disappears in scenes like a superhero and the plot about her trying to stop a nuclear war borders on the ridiculous.
Instead of a film that explores what being a victim of abuse would look like we have a film that desperately doesn’t want to be the other films and so looks like a bad collection of memories of what people thought of the other films. Foy’s Salander is solid but nothing like as oddly compelling. Similarly, the plot has an underplaying of the Mikael Blomkvist character this time played by Sverrir Gudnason.
Gone is the intriguing relationship between the two, and with Gudnason looking less like Craig’s every-man, over the hill hero, and more like someone at home in an action film there is none of that slow, sad matter about him. Similarly, the underused Vicky Krieps is too young to be playing Erika Berger publisher of Millennium and Blomkvist’s lover.
LaKeith Stanfield is good as the American in Sweden trying to stop Armageddon but his character has little agency, and even a very fine Stephen Merchant opts for British instead of Swedish. His Oppenheimer like character is the heart of the film but it falls apart when he is taken out of the story and it becomes a normal action thriller. Even Sylvia Hoeks as the villain of the film looks ridiculous, and her motivation is more at home in a Mission: Impossible movie than a dark neo-noir crime thriller.
Luckily Alvarez can stage a thrilling sequence such as a chase where Lisbeth takes her motorbike across a frozen lake or an airport chase sequence, and he’s not afraid to go for horror when it needs to happen, but everything in the film feels a little too much like it’s aping the style of Fincher.
It’s not a terrible film, but it’s a pointless one, rebooting a franchise that was never supposed to be one, losing the attention to detail in favour of a superhero action film and losing the cold heart at the centre. But, Roque Banos’ score will leave you wishing it was used in a more haunting film and Foy continues to show her range in projects you might not have expected. But this is not a new era for the character and more The Girl in the Mediocre action thriller, and really Lisbeth deserves better.
