The Girl in the Spider’s Web

“Call it a spectacular failure
to read the room,” said
Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out
New York. Lisbeth Salander,
the hacker vigilante of Stieg
Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon
Tattoo novels, could have been
a warrior idol of the #MeToo
era, having punished her rapist
and hunted down a misogynist
serial killer in the first film
adaptation. But this second installment “strips its
hero of everything that made her spiky and singular.”
Now played by Claire Foy instead of Rooney
Mara, Salander has become “a bland videogame
avatar” given the generic big-screen task of stopping
a nuclear-armed madman.
A bid to position Salander as a
franchise-worthy action hero is
“by no means a bad thing,” said
Benjamin Lee in TheGuardian
.com. “But forcing Salander
into Bond’s shoes feels like
a misstep.” Though Foy is a
“commanding presence,” the
character’s intellect and survivalist
mentality are wasted by the
unimaginative screenplay. Spider’s Web at least succeeds
as “an absorbing airplane novel of a movie,”
said William Bibbiani in TheWrap.com. Full of
inventive fight scenes and high-speed car chases,
“it’s not insightful—it’s just really, really cool.”