![]() She survives but is sufficiently distracted to miss her meeting with Balder and his young son, August ( Christopher Convery) and Balder, deciding he has made another mistake, throws himself on the mercy of the Swedish Secret Service, whose deputy director (Synnove Macody Lund) hides them away in a safe house. This proves to be easy enough but someone else is on the trail as well and steals her computer before blowing up her apartment with her in it. After getting it up and running, however, it dawns on him that this was probably not a good idea and so he wants Lisbeth to steal it away from the NSA computers and hide it. It seems that Balder invented a computer program named Firefall that gives the person using it the power to hack virtually any nuclear missile system in the world. However, she is still a hacker first and foremost and when she is offered a seemingly impossible job to do by former NSA employee Frans Balder ( Stephen Merchant), she cannot resist the urge to take it. Now, having skipped over the two follow-up books that Larsson himself wrote before his death (and considering the weakness of the Swedish film adaptations, that was probably a good idea), the English-language version of the franchise is being relaunched with “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” and this time around, the resulting film features all of the dubious qualities of the previous entries listed above without any of the virtues.īased on a novel by David Lagercrantz, the writer hired by Larsson’s family to create new stories, the film takes place three years after the events of “Dragon Tattoo” and finds Lisbeth (now played by Claire Foy) working as a sort of avenging angel for abused women everywhere-she is introduced to us as she ties up a slick businessman with a penchant for beating women and transfers his bank account holdings to the wife he has just smacked around, before applying a Taser to his genitals. However, Fincher directed it with such elegance and precision-without tamping down any of the edgier elements in order to make things more palatable to the masses-that it also resulted in a film that was much better than it had any real right to be. ![]() When David Fincher did his surprisingly by-the-book big-budget studio version of the story soon afterwards, it still had the lumpy storyline as well as a performance by Rooney Mara as Salander that, while perfectly adequate in its own right, could not begin to hold a candle to Rapace’s stunning take on the part. ![]() The original Swedish-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s phenomenally successful novel “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was not an especially great film by most cinematic standards-it was directed in an efficient though relatively nondescript manner that didn’t always hide the occasional clunkiness of the narrative-but it contained a performance by Noomi Rapace as troubled hacker genius Lisbeth Salander that was so focused and driven and compelling that it single-handedly elevated the proceedings to the level of compulsively watchable.
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