Caught in the Spider's Web

This week's installment of our fall movie reviews is the newest installment of Stieg Larsson's Millenium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web.

But first, a word on previews: why do theatres think we should get half a dozen, or more, previews?  Twenty plus minutes of something that's not the movie you came to see.  And, in the case of Spider's Web, not much that snared you in.  It was an odd mix of previews -- some action, some tending towards art films (I'm still trying to figure out where Widows falls, after seeing the preview quadzillion times).

Maybe the most interesting part of Spider's Web is the casting of Claire Foy, most famous as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, as Lisbeth Salander. 

Foy is good in the role; the Swedish accent she uses works well enough.

Interviews have made much of this movie and its being shot during the beginnings of the #MeToo movement.  But this isn't that movie -- although it opens with Lisbeth avenging a husband who has clearly beaten his wife, that's all of it.  None of the rest of the plot deals with this -- a bit of a red herring.

As with all Larsson vehicles, you have to pay attention to the plot.  It is a bit convoluted, somehow working a sister into the plot, after all the other manipulations with computer files and hacking -- standard Lisbeth stuff.

It's entertaining enough.  And, as usual in the series, a bit masochistic. 

It's also, again typically, a bit far-fetched: we get where we believe in action thrillers that the bad guy can't hit the hero from six feet away with an automatic pistol.  Lisbeth survives with just a large graze, somehow.

And somehow survives falling from a second story; a car crash; a gas attack; being sucked tightly into a plastic skin. 

Routine stuff.

In the end, it's a pleasant enough movie.  If it's to be someone's Oscar bait, I'm not sure whose: maybe the stunt people, though it doesn't begin to compare with Mission: Impossible last summer.

Go see it.