Review: Girl in the Spider's Web is fairly middling

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is back and now she is the Girl in the Spider's Web.

Barely recognisable to fans of her as the Queen, Claire Foy is Lisbeth Salander - the laptop-wielding avenging angel, the righter of wrongs and the woman with a very pleasing disregard for authority.

This is a kind of a soft reboot of the Swedish literary phenomenon known as the Millennium Trilogy. Foy is the third actor to play Lisbeth and this fifth film is based on a fourth book - numbers which all add up to a big audience.

In The Girl in the Spider's Web, the character of Michael Blomkvist - the investigative journalist on mission to rattle politician's cages - is side-lined in favour of a new take on Lisbeth, who morphs into an almost unkillable super-agent, capable of surviving pretty much anything the bad guys throw at her.

But things get very personal, very quickly and the vulnerabilities that fuel her also foil her.

This is a fairly middling outing for a far from middling character.

Foy is great, but the story's treatment of Lisbeth has a crisis of faith. There's likely enough well-executed action to pull audiences in for the ride, but not much else to make it memorable.

Three stars.

Newshub.