The Girl in the Spider's Web

I am not a fan of the Millennium Trilogy, largely because it has two characters who - for completely different reasons - infuriate me. So what was I doing at the movie adaptation of the fourth, gun-for-hire, Lisbeth Salander novel?

Claire Foy, that’s why. I was prepared to give it a shot for Claire Foy, another of the new generation of performers who just hypnotise me; Foy, Kiernan Shipka, Millie Bobby Brown, the one and only Chloe Grace Moretz. There’s something in the way they look at a camera which makes me want to look back. Plus, the trailer had some cool stuff in it. Death by airbag. Motorbikes on ice floes. Hand-of-god sniper fire.

Well, it’s all there. Except Claire Foy, who appears to have been given very simple direction. “Claire” the director said “You’re the only native English speaker in the cast. Don’t upstage the Swedes. They’re doing their best.” Claire duly dials everything way down. Way, way down. The poor old Swedes are not blasted off the screen. Heaven help them. I’m not saying they took Lagercrantz’s novel and ran the dialogue through Google translate to get the script, but I’m going to need proof that they didn’t. At one level, fair enough for Claire Foy. She’s playing someone with either autism or some kind of emotional development disorder, depending on exactly what you choose to believe Lisbeth Salander’s damage is. This was always going to be a role with not much talking and even less emoting. That just left the poor old Swedes having to explain the plot using whatever they’re given by the scriptwriter. God help them.

And yet it’s a surprisingly OK movie. The plot is straight up stupid hacker McGuffin nonsense like I thought they’d stopped making any more, but it hangs together and stuff happens in a logical sequence. If you want to believe that it’s possible to write a programme that can control the world’s nuclear missiles remotely and that it will fit into 2528 bytes of code, this is your movie. If you think we need a female James Bond, this could be right up your street; whoever did the title sequence seems to have thought this was a Bond movie, and Lisbeth Salander still has that screw anything, hurt anything, break anything, do anything, unstoppable by anything, balagan that Bond movies run on.

In that sense, nothing has changed. Salander can do whatever the plot needs her to do, and Blomkvist is still every woman’s dream date. Heaven help us, they held back two or three minutes of run time just to hammer home that his editor Erika is still splitting hr time between her husband and Blomkvist, easily my least favourite bit of the first three books. If none of that took the enamel off your molars ten years ago, you’re going to lean right in on this movie and eat it all up.

And stuff can kind of work, if you’re ready to suspend all disbelief. One of the best setpieces in the movie is Salander running down the guys what have kidnapped the moppet who lies at the heart of all the McGuffinage. She’s just been injected with god only knows what after losing a fistfight hard. She walks it off by grinding up and snorting random drugs that fell out of the bathroom cabinet, then staggers out in the open air, kicks a dead cop out of an unmarked Volvo, and chases down the BMW getaway car, dividing her time between driving the car, shaking off the drugs, programming the in car navigation system to track her target and using her smartphone to hack the BMW so that she can trigger the airbags and run it off the road that way. At sixty miles an hour. On drugs. It’s ridiculous, but Foy kind of sells it. It’s a pretty cool chase scene. It’s just - well read that description back.

Salander is not like the other children, is what I’m saying. So not like them that it’s best to think of it all happening by magic. Which is cool and all, but it does take the suspense out of things. No matter how battered she might get in the moment, she’s still going to overcome all opposition by laser guided planning, improbabl computer skills and concentrated essence of bad ass.

And Claire Foy is genuinely good enough to sell the idea, at least some of the time. Weirdly a lot of it is in the walk. She’s absolutely tiny, and she walks like she just washed out of ballet school, but something in that stride conveys absolute determination. Pity no-one else is keeping up with her.

 

Overlord; where zombies dare

Overlord is very like itself, in that something which ought to have been dead years ago has lurched to life because people are meddling with things they don’t understand. This is not something which ought to work, and yet, rather crazily it does. Mostly, it’s because it’s not messing around. The Allied characters are walking cliches but the actors lean right into it and make them work. The Nazis have no redeeming features, which jars in today’s world of antiheroes and shades of grey, and then you think to yourself; hang on, these are actual Nazis doing hideous experiments on innocent people. By this stage, anyone with a higher impulse would have shot himself out of sheer embarassment. 

And yes, you’re going to sit there in the early going thinking things like “Hang on, there weren’t any racially integrated units in the 1944 US Army.” or “How would an aircraft be flying in daylight over the Allied invasion fleet ahead of doing a night paradrop?” Snap out of it. We’re about to watch Nazi zombies. If ever there was a time to remind yourself it’s just a movie, this is it.

And yes, you’re going to be reminded that this is a job where JJ Abrams had an input. The McGuffin involves red goop, just as damn near everything in JJ Abrams' world seems to do. What are you going to do? JJ gonna JJ.

The important question is, does it work? Well, the projector threw a rod at my showing, which pretty much wrecked the last act; we kept seeing bits of the ending out of sequence as the projectionist gamely wrestled with the software and tried to get things back on the rails. But that didn’t ruin anything which went before, and I’d say if you got a straight run at it, it would just be simple fun from one end to the other. Shane Black could do a lot worse than take a look at Overlord and see how you can throw together a “motley crew of military screw-ups take on monsters” movie. The paratroop platoon gets cut down to a manageable number of stereotypes in jig time until there’s just four soldiers struggling to figure out how they’re going to blow up a radio jamming station before the sun comes up. 

It’s not gonna be easy, and that’s before they realise that the radio jamming station’s on top of a hell-mouth and they’ve got to deal with Nazis and Nazi zombies just to get to the station. Good thing they’ve got luck, a plucky French villager and a corporal who’s killed half of Italy to tell them what to do. Corporal Ford’s the best thing in the movie, 100 proof cool from the moment he tells the platoon photographer to get out of his face til the moment that he throws the head Nazi’s SS cigarette lighter back in his face. Everyone else on the Allied side is likeable, but Ford is the size the movie really needs.

So, there you go. Things can still surprise you. I wouldn’t have said you could make a cross between Where Eagles Dare and Frankenstein as anything other than a spoof, but Overlord showed me that you can drag those things out of the 1970s and play them straight, and it will still work. Just keep it simple, hire a cast that respects the tone, and get on with it.

Widows; with men like this, why would you want to be anything else?

The key insight in Widows is that men are just the worst, though I’m not sure anyone was still on the fence about that one. If you just watched the trailer, you’d think it’s a movie about four women carrying on where their villainous husbands left off. Well, yes, there are women in it, and they’re planning a robbery. But the camera spends a lot of time checking out what the men of the world are up to. The robbery plan is tangled up in political infighting in Chicago, and we spend as much time listening in to the two horrible sides of that fight as we spend with Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriquez and Elizabeth Debicki and eventually Cynthia Erivo (Cynthia’s on a roll; she was the most surprising thing in Bad Times at the El Royale and she’s holding her own here against her three co-robbers).

And what an awful bunch of men we’ve got. The robbers which made the widows are no great loss to the world when they get themselves shot to pieces and blown up in a botched robbery; their destruction is such a “no-one could walk away from that moment” that as soon as it happened, I started a clock in my head for the moment when at least one of them would turn out to have just done that. Well, a stately jog, as it turns out, but I didn’t let that make me think I was wrong. Then there’s the two sides of the political race; Colin Farrell’s ghastly white sixth generation ward heeler pitted against Brian Tyree Henry’s crime-boss who’s decided politics is the logical next move to a life of criminal ease and unlimited money. Daniel Kaluuya gets to wipe out all the “Awww” he got from Get Out by playing Henry’s brother as such a walking blemish that when he finally gets got, your main reaction will be that it didn’t hurt anything like as much as it should have. Over on the white and privileged side of things, Colin Farrell has an equally ghastly family member in the shape of Robert Duvall’s grisly fifth generation ward heeler, all rage against minorities and disappointment that his son isn’t an entirely shameless monster.

Because, own this; Colin Farrell’s whiny privileged political manipulator - and part time murder plot organiser - is probably the most likeable man in the movie, apart from Viola Davis’ driver. For #MeToo players, check out the queasy undercurrents in Lukas Haas’ character, who rents Elizabeth Debicki for sex when it suits him, and gives an all too convincing performance of a creep who thinks that he’s a nice guy because he doesn’t actually threaten women into giving him sex. I sat there fuming, because in such a uniformly horrible male cast, there was a real risk that there would be people in the audience who’d think that Haas was playing a relatively nice guy. Tragically, he doesn’t get hit by a bus. I like to imagine it happened off screen.

Thank goodness for the women. They’re not written as great people either, but at least they don’t leave a slime trail wherever they go. And they have spirit. I wanted them to win; not just to make it out alive, but to win. And the movie needs that angle to work at all. The robbery takes a matter of minutes. The planning is occasionally fun, but it’s not often tense. So it will work only if you buy the characters and want to see what happens to them. That, above all, is what McQueen gets right in directing the movie. He has a great cast, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them. And even the small victories are glorious in their way. When Debicki goes out to buy guns without a clue, and figures out how to borrow a clue from someone else, you share her glee at carrying it off. Of course, equally when she’s being used by Lukas Haas, your heart’s in your boots as you look for an exit. Somehow, the stakes feel highest for Debicki’s character, and it’s not just because there’s something so frail and ethereal about her; it’s that she’s coming into the game with the least of all the players and has so few options. Every victory counts.

And I can’t tell you if she wins or not; the movie leaves me guessing. In her last scene, she has an absolutely perfect coat, but I’ve no idea how she got it, or where she’s going next. Probably not a sequel; this is not that kind of movie.

Slaughterhouse Rulez

I was under no illusions about Slaughterhouse Rulez; the poster made it clear that the cast was people I’d never heard of, plus Nick Frost and Simon Pegg playing nerds out of their depths, and Michael Sheen playing smug evil, a job he does with the same worrying conviction that Gerard Butler brings to being a scowling murderer. Please, I find myself thinking, let this be really good acting.

I assumed the cast were going to get wiped out to the last man and just hoped that it might try to be funny along the way. I wasn’t too far off the mark. It’s a determinedly cheap movie that mashes If into a monster movie with a side order of a swipe at capitalism in general and fracking in particular. I can sort of see why they went with a monster movie. The swipes at the public school system are funnier and more interesting, but there’s no very obvious place to take that kind of thing narratively, so just as Chandler wrote his way out of dead ends by having a guy walk into the room with a gun, enter the monsters. The writers had made all the points they wanted to about class warfare and cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and there was a certain need for action.

It’s best not to think about the action too much. As usual, the Aristotelian unities are not respected; I defy you to make sense of how the locations are connected or the way in which time passes once things get weird. And as always, the monsters don’t make any sense. They’re big, carnivorous and come from underground. What the hell were they eating underground? How does that ecology even work? And if they’re popping up out of the fracking works, why isn’t the rest of the ecology popping out ahead of them? 

So there you are with a public school full of posh swine being cruel to each other. That kind of thing gets pricy if you want to get it right, so cleverly they put most of the action in a couple of rooms, and then set the main action around a bank holidy when most of the kids and most of the teachers are off the campus having fun somewhere else. So that they can get away with a vast public school with only a dozen speaking kids, a matron, a headmaster and just one teacher. This freed up just enough money for some CGI for the monsters, and you’re away at the races.

Pegg, Frost and Sheen are their usual dependable selves. They’re such good performers that they can make something out of almost anything. Sheen’s fleering headmaster is theatrically unpleasant, but the moment where he delays the getaway from the monsters because he insists on pulling on his driving gloves before even starting the car is a perfect character moment. Of course he’s the kind of clown who has a Skoda AND driving gloves, and even more of course, he’s the kind of person who has to complete all his little rituals no matter what else is going on. Same with Pegg; of course he’s completely inadequate, but in a crunch he’s still trying to do the right thing and be the person he thought he always had in him.

However, the standout performance is Asa Butterfield’s tortured quip machine Willoughby Blake. The ostensible hero of the piece is Finn Cole’s Don Wallace, who’s there as the audience surrogate; bluff decent northerner who doesn’t even want to be there and has to have everything explained to him. But Will is both much more fun and much more of a hero, albeit a very unwilling and frequently downright spiteful one. He provides a mordant running commentary on everything else in the movie, but his perfect moment comes as the survivors are legging it and they realise they’ve left someone behind. “We’ve got to go back for him!” and Will deadpans reflectively “Do we, though?” and keeps right on going.