3 stars out of 5
As Meatloaf once said, Claire Foy: Don’t be sad, ’cause two out of three ain’t bad. Foy has had a real nice 2018, with Unsane and First Man, but her luck finally ran out. Not that The Girl in the Spider’s Web is bad — it’s certainly watchable — just nothing particularly special.
Don’t blame Foy. She reveals yet another side of her talents, believable as an action hero. (Even if, with short hair, she looks too much like Kate McKinnon.) And in case you didn’t know which fictional world we’re in, early on we see Foy showering, revealing a big ol’ dragon tattoo on her back. The 2011 American Tattoo tale was much more of a prestige project: David Fincher, Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright. This time we get Foy, Stephen Merchant (who doesn’t seem sure what he’s doing here), and the hypnotized dude from the garden party in Get Out.
And while that previous film for the most part avoided being a genre exercise, this one is primarily standard-issue chases, fights, shooting, and explosions. (A bridge escape that they want us to find really clever left me thinking “so what?”) From the get-go, this is highly stylized — cold Swedish tech world — but as a result never feels real. A kid central to the plot doesn’t seem the least bit genuine. And I laughed aloud when a character smashes a frame to look inside a magazine — I guess the online article was behind a paywall?
Still, despite the flaws and the made-on-the-cheap vibe, or perhaps because of those things, this is pretty enjoyable. It’s kind of like a cheesy 70s European movie, so corny that it’s almost good. Almost.
Jack Silbert, curator