IT’S lamentable that David Fincher’s stylish and compelling English-language version of Swedish sensation The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was never allowed to flourish into a series in its own right, especially when it’s been reshaped into something far more generic.

This skips over the second and third books in the Millennium series to adapt the only one not written by the late author Stieg Larsson. And given the talent involved – namely Don’t Breathe director Fede Alvarez and Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight – this quasi-reboot has more than a whiff of disappointing missed opportunity about it.

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We catch up with Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy, taking over the role from Rooney Mara), the black-wearing, monosyllabic expert hacker with

a troubled past, in Stockholm as she continues to carry out her self-appointed duties as an avenging angel – “the girl who hurts men who hurt women”.

One day she accepts a job from computer programmer Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) to retrieve a dangerous programme called Firefall he developed from America’s National Security Agency which is capable of accessing the world’s nuclear weapons.

The hunter becomes the hunted as she finds herself the target of a mysterious international crime syndicate calling itself The Spiders. She then contacts journalist and old friend/former lover Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) to help her uncover a truth that, unbeknownst to her, links back to her own past.

On the surface it promises some rewarding exploration of legacy and dark memories coming back to haunt the present. But that’s all it is – a promise. It quickly becomes evident it’s far more interested in chase sequences and shoot-outs than grappling with the difficult emotional and thematic quandaries in the DNA of the central character and shaving the harsh edges off the weirdness in favour of more easily digestible broad strokes.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to like here; Foy is one of the finest actors of her generation, as she’s already proven in everything from Netflix’s The Crown to moon-landing drama First Man. She defies doubts over her suitability for the character with a captivatingly steely-eyed, hardened and fittingly off-kilter performance that convinces fully even when the script doesn’t.

It’s a definite case of the performance being better than the film that houses it. She carries something that is only sporadically compelling, with moments of invention (a sequence involving a latex suit being sucked dry of air is one of the few visuals that linger) drowned out by muddled sub-Bourne plotting and a pace too busy hurrying along to the next thing.

It’s hamstrung from the get-go by somewhat mediocre source material and results in a film that gets too tangled up in its own pedestrian yet needlessly convoluted narrative web.