“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is a movie adaptation of the novel of the same name. The main characters are from the “Dragon Tattoo” franchise. This relates to the book series, and then turned into movies, written by Stieg Larsson. Since he passed away, his creation has continued to grow. The main ‘girl’ is Lisbeth Salander, and now she is played by a different actress and tells a different story. But she still keeps her cool and curt attitude, and her special computer hacking skills. This story goes into the past, and it plays with the current time in Sweden.
Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is a stealth protector of women in need, and the champion of small children in distress. Her methods of vengeance are swift and very costly, if you are a man who abuses a woman. She helps a wife of a famous businessman who has just been released from a trial after roughing up some prostitutes. He takes out his anger on his wife’s face. But Salander is an avenging angel to give this bad dude some rough treatment of his own. There is a new person who asks Salander for help. It is Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), a computer scientist from America, who has created a special program that can take over any military nuclear computer system. He hires Salander to hack into the NSA, and move the program her own laptop.
Edwin Neeham (LaKeith Stanfield) who is an NSA employee discovers the program is missing, and it was transferred to Sweden. He goes to Sweden to track it down, and he learns of Salander. Salander has also been targeted by a shadowy group, called the Spiders, has also targeted Salander. They steal her laptop and destroy her apartment, and she barely survives. But between Needham and the Spider thugs, Salander is being chased from all sides. Plus the National Swedish Security group is after her. Balder, the computer scientist is killed, and Salander gets his young son to take care of him. Salander will need some help, so she contacts an old friend Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason), the journalist who had helped her in previous adventures.
Salander’s past catches up with her – because her difficulties with the Spiders takes a weird turn. The group is led by someone that she thought was long dead. Camilla Salander (Sylvia Hoeks) is Lisbeth’s sister, but Lizbeth had fled the family home when she was just a young girl. Camilla was trapped with her pervert father, and she grew up with his sick demands. But she learned his devious ways to take over his criminal syndicate and then called it the ‘Spiders’. Needham and Blomkvist team up with Salander to fight against her sister, and her sinister group. They now hold the special program on Salander’s laptop, and they have taken Balder’s son, who is the key to gaining access to the Military hacking program.
This movie has a quick pace and some tense moments of intense action. However, there are sequences that show how far ahead Salander has planned out every potential activity – that it begins to be absurd. Salander has become an indestructible computer genius that can program and hack her way into and out of every situation. She is an emotionless automated fighting and thinking machine, sort of a “Salander Bourne”. Claire Foy does a very precise job making Salander an enigma wrapped in a MMA fighter. LaKeith Stanfield does a very entertaining job as the NSA agent ready to take out anyone in his way. Sverrir Gudnason does not have as much to hold to for his role.
They various locations and setting around Sweden are used to great advantage. They are beautiful to see, and they are used to portray the coldness of the country. The story line gets a bit stretched out, so that people are doing things that would be close to impossible. Salander becomes a martial-art trained fighter, and Needham becomes a high-powered sniper, and so on. However, if you get past that, the story is delivered in a quickly paced manner that gets your pulse racing in some spots.
