We’ve come a long way from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
In 2011, director David Fincher released his version of Stieg Larsson’s international best-seller, with Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Robin Wright and Joely Richardson.
It completely wallowed in the obvious darkness of Larsson’s murder-mystery and went on to become a critical success, as well as a commercial one, making over $230 million worldwide.
That’s a lot of money for a nearly three-hour movie that was given a justified adults-only certificate due to the intense physical and sexual violence it contained.
Everyone was signed on to be involved in the two direct sequels – The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – but rumour had it that the sequels had to be a lot shorter, far less intense, and they also had to cost a lot less.
Despite not featuring any huge blockbuster cast members (this was pre-Skyfall for Craig) or special effects-heavy action sequences, the movie still cost around $100 million to produce, before any advertising or promotion was involved.
Eventually, things fell apart, and Sony decided to reboot. Kind of.
They jumped straight to the fourth book in the series (also the first that Larsson himself didn’t write, having passed away right before the first three books were published), with a new director (Fede Alverez – Don’t Breathe), writer (Steven Knight – Peaky Blinders) and cast.
Claire Foy (The Crown, First Man) does her best in a role that both expands the character of Lisbeth Salander while also demystifying her.
Salander was a fantastic character because we knew all we needed to know by her actions and reactions, but Spider’s Web goes deep into her personal history, acting in part as a sorta-prequel as well as sorta-reboot-sequel.
We get a lot of explanations for things nobody asked for, and as anyone who has ever seen The Phantom Menace or An Unexpected Journey or Prometheus, answering questions nobody was asking never ends in anything but disappointment.
And that isn’t even the biggest mistake that the movie makes.
Clip via Sony Pictures Ireland
No, that award goes to the fact that they somehow tried to make Lisbeth into a hacker version of Ethun Hunt or Jason Bourne.
Mikael Blomkvist is back (this time played by handsome, bottomless well of non-charisma Sverrir Gudnason), but he might as well not be.
The original’s tightly-knitted story of a killer sending pictures to the family of a girl he killed decades earlier is replaced by… a bad guy gang wanting nuclear codes?
Oh, and the leader of the bad-guy gang is Lisbeth’s long-lost sister Camilla (a completely underwritten Sylvia Hoeks) who wants the codes because… Lisbeth ran away from their abusive home when they were kids?
We’re asking because these were the reasons the movie gave, but we’re not entirely sure they make any sense.
So with a much more epic plot, we’ve now got Lisbeth getting into shootouts and car chases, no longer trying to solve a murder but literally trying to save the entire world.
Alvarez shoots the whole thing with a chilly competence, Knight obviously does his best with the “Wait, how did we get here?” story from the novel, and Foy is a decent replacement for Mara (who was a decent replacement for Noomi Rapace), but instead of asking how to make any of this work, we’re guessing nobody asked if they should make it work.
One thing is for certain – Sony got what they wanted.
Most of the unique intensity is gone, the film is under two hours and it deployed a budget of only $43 million to produce.
It just came at the expense of an actually good movie.
The Girl In The Spider’s Web is released in Irish cinemas from Wednesday 21 November
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