Lisbeth Salander, the cult figure and title character of the acclaimed Millennium book series created by Stieg Larsson, will return to the screen in The girl in the spider’s web, a first-time adaptation of the recent global bestseller.
Noomi Rapace’s The girl with the dragon tattoo had a delicious malevolence and raw energy to it. This was partly due to a bold script, but mostly due to the believability of Noomi’s balls-to-the-wall performance. She killed it.
I (even though a fan of Rooney Mara) skipped the American version. American remakes of European/Japanese/other foreign films are nine out of ten times rather bland. They’ve been sanitised, neutered into something politically correct, something palatable to the masses (without subtitles, obviously).
I get that it’s all about money. Noomi’s The girl with the dragon tattoo made only $10 million, versus Rooney’s which made $102 million. Should money be the bottom line, though? I hope not. We will lose out on so much innovation, genre experiments and off-the-wall gems.
When Claire Foy’s The girl in the spider’s web came around, I thought I should give it a go. At least, a) it is a European production, and b) Claire Foy was phenomenal in The crown.
Alas, it is a beautiful but sterile and wholly predictable yarn. The aim here was to make money, not to innovate or be bold. Even the film description above, taken straight from Rotten Tomatoes, is entirely uninspiring. It is frightening to think that the producers/filmmakers thought that their audience deserves no more effort than that. They have Claire and the franchise as drawcards; why should they bother? I certainly fell for it.
Of course, the production values are high. The locations range from epic castles to even more epic snowy landscapes. There’s a flashy car, a Ducati bike thrown in, along with some utterly obvious Sony product placement. Yes, the interiors are suitably Swedish and you have the recurring themes of spiders and chess. There are striking scenes, too – one of the most spectacular car crashes caught on film; a smoky scene with all the baddies wearing red-eye gasmasks; Lisbeth trapped in a black, plastic, suction torture tool; etc. But, it is to no avail. The film in its entirety is rather boring.
Claire Foy was not the correct choice for this role. Her accent slips back to the Queen’s English (which is surprisingly close to a Swedish accent), and she does not have the physicality to make any of the fight scenes believable. Don’t get me started on the hair. If you want to do a Mohawk, commit to it. Shave the sides and get those spikes right. Also, lose the fringe, man.
The major storyline is Lisbeth returning to her past and facing her demons. When she eventually does have the one on one with her twisted sister clad in red, I was rubbing my hands, ready for some meaty dialogue, something dark and sinister. They do exchange some words, there are the expected tears, and then one of them does something totally silly, not in keeping with her character at all. (I am not going to say what.) It is the biggest anticlimax. I guess, the red-devil-sister calling Lisbeth by her nickname, “Libby”, should have been a warning. Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth Salander was nobody’s Libby.
