ReelBob: ‘The Girl in the Spider’s Web’ ★★1/2

By Bob Bloom

Lisbeth Salander returns to the screen in “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

At the outset of the film, she remains the supreme hacker and righter of wrongs — a vigilante who specializes in punishing men who abuse women.

But this latest movie seems tentative and lost, grabbing threads here and there without forming a cohesive whole.

The movie’s main problem is that it is too conventional — an action thriller with chases and explosions you have seen in dozens of other features.

The main plot of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is more suited for a James Bond adventure than one involving Salander.

While the film offers some flashbacks and explanations about Salander and her family, it is not enough to compensate for the shortcomings that plague this feature.

Basically, Salander is recruited by scientist Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) to retrieve the programming for a doomsday device he created and gave to America’s NSA years earlier.

Having second thoughts, he wants Salander to hack into the NSA’s servers.

However, a criminal organization, known as the Spiders and headed by a mysterious woman, also wants the programming.

“Spider’s Web” devolves into a series of back-and-forth encounters in which Salander and the villains retain possession of a computer containing the coding.

The film includes some rather outlandish and preposterous situations, such as Salander’s warehouse apartment being blown up, while she survives by diving into a water-filled bathtub.

Director Fede Alvarez, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Basu and Stephen Knight, has transformed Salander into a Dark Knight­007 hybrid who bests henchmen twice her size and survives various crashes and hand-to-hand combats with a few bloody cuts and bruises that fail to slow her down.

And while the script does offer some insights into Salander, the other cast members are basically props there to help Salander when needed.

Those include LaKeith Stanfield as an NSA operative trying to recover the program, and journalist and sometime-lover Mikael Blomkvist (a bland Sverrir Gudnason).

The only characters to even elicit a modicum of interest are Sylvia Hoeks as the Spiders’ leader, who also is linked to Salander’s past, and young Christopher Convery as August, Balder’s gifted son.

Transforming Salander into a stereotypical action hero makes her much less interesting, even though Claire Foy — who has taken on the role initially portrayed by Noomi Rapace in the original Swedish trilogy and Rooney Mara in the American remake of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” — does very fine work in the dramatic sequences, while displaying her action chops in other scenes.

“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” changes Salander from a hacker, who also uses her computer skills as an investigator, to a pseudo-secret agent-type operative battling a global conspiracy.

Unfortunately that is not who Salander is. It’s like stripping her of her all-black wardrobe and putting her in a ball gown. The two simply do not go together.

I am a member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. My reviews appear at ReelBob (reelbob.com) and Rottentomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com). I also review Blu-rays and DVDs. I can be reached by email at bobbloomjc@gmail.com or on Twitter @ReelBobBloom. Links to my reviews can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB 2 stars out of 4 (R), graphic violence, language, nudity, sexual content

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEINTQ2AP9k