The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels by Stieg Larssen were a phenomenon that went on to launch an entire genre of novels, TV series and films - "Scandi-noir".
As the name suggests, they involve pitch-black plots set in the frozen North, with another feature of 1940s "film noir" - strong female characters. Many of them boast equally strong male and female leads.
The Larssen books were called "The Millenium novels" after the magazine where Mikael Blomkvist works as a crusading journalist.
Mikael investigates corruption - political and personal - and enlists the aid of an angry punk hacker called Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth has a thing about violence against women. She doesn't like it.
When Stieg Larssen died, the pen for the stories was handed to another writer who decided that Lisbeth was by far the most interesting character in the books - which is true - and the story would benefit from concentrating on her, which isn't.
Photo: Supplied
So instead of the intriguing and unpredictable Lisbeth of the first three books, The Girl in the Spider's Web now has a rather blank slate who carries out elaborate vigilante feats despite no obvious source of income. Oh no, she's turned into The Equalizer!
This is despite being played by the supremely talented Claire Foy, who gives Lisbeth Salander as much depth as you can when your character is basically defined by beating up billionaires and being blown up regularly.
She's given a nameless girlfriend, who's mostly there to tease out a few more details about her terrible upbringing.
You may remember Lisbeth was regularly abused by a psychotic father, now dead. You may not know - because they've only just made it up - that she shared this abuse with a twin sister, Camilla.
Yes, back to work for Lisbeth.
She gets a job working for a disillusioned scientist, played by Stephen Merchant, who's made a magical gizmo that unscrupulous companies plan to use for evil. Please help us, Lisbeth, you're our only hope.
So Lisbeth hacks into the Dark Web, plucks passwords out of the air, burns off cell-phones and generally displays her uncanny technical abilities.
This is pretty boring for the rest of us to watch. Hurry up, bad guys, blow her up while leaving a bunch of clues for us to investigate later.
At last, The Girl in the Spider's Web belatedly realizes these films only work when they bring in Lisbeth's old colleague Mikael. Someone's got to be the Doctor Watson character, after all, saying "Lisbeth that's amazing" and "You're crazy, you'll get yourself killed".
He also has to chase up the clue - a photo of a bad guy with a spider tattoo.
All spider tattoos lead to Lisbeth's childhood it seems, and it looks like the Spider People are a bunch of bad guys who answer to sister Camilla.
Camilla has her own reason to want to take down Lisbeth.
Meanwhile, Mikael - well, meanwhile Mikael nothing, he mostly makes token appearances, with his place often taken by forgettable CIA agent Needham.
With minimal sidekicks, this puts a rather bigger strain on the character of Lisbeth - not that Claire Foy can't handle it, but you can't make bricks without straw.
Despite the none-more noir look, the noisy soundtrack and a bike chase across a frozen river in Stockholm, I found myself lightly dozing off rather more often than I expected during something promoted as a thriller.
The Girl in the Spider's Web is just a bleak tangle defying you to stay awake.
